CRI听力:Mailboxes to Phase out?

Mr. Zhang has been a postman for more than 20 years. Every day he collects letters twice a day from these mail boxes on the streets in Nanchang city, Jiangxi province. Zhang says over the past decade the number of letters in the mail boxes has become fewer and fewer. Recently, there have only been a couple of letters waiting to be delivered in these mail boxes.

"Previously, I usually collected 60 to 70 letters a day from these mail boxes, and there would be many more letters at the end of the year. At that time, my bag was often crammed with letters."

Currently there are more than 600 mail boxes on the streets in the downtown area of the city. Different from those mail boxes outside some universities and schools that are still often filled with letters, the mail boxes in the downtown area only receive about five or six letters a week. Many citizens say they rarely write letters nowadays.

"I often wrote letters before, as you know people who were in love usually wrote letters to their loved ones. But now when we have so many other communication tools, why bother writing letters anymore."

As letter writing has slowly fallen out of our daily habits, people are starting to have varying opinions on the mail boxes which remain in the streets. One citizen says mail boxes are no longer needed as most people communicate via other means.

Lin Changhe from China Post says their statistics show that the use of mail boxes has sharply declined.

"Last year, we delivered 17 million letters in Jiangxi province. That means every three people wrote one letter a year."

One citizen says she believes that the mail boxes on the streets will become a kind of scenic spot in the future.

As mail boxes slowly become obsolete, many people are asking whether it's still necessary to keep them on the street. Zhou Jian, head of the local post office in Nanchang city explains.

"It's true that the number of personal letters sent through mail boxes has been decreasing. However, we cannot say that the mail boxes are no longer useful due to the decreasing number; they still represent public service equipment as laid out by the national standard."

Contrary to the drop in the number of personal letters, more and more business and commercial letters are being sent through mail boxes. According to the post offices in Jiangxi province, more than 100 million commercial letters were sent last year; indicating that the mail boxes are still useful, but in different way.

Wang Yuqi, head of the Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences insists that the joy brought by writing and receiving letters cannot be replaced by the internet. Letters are sent with a stamp, an envelope and are created with handwriting. During the process of sending and receiving letters, both the sender and the receiver have varying expectations. For this reason, Wang believes that letters remain a charming and elegant form of communication in today's society.

For CRI, I am Zhang Wan.