In order to widely publicize the role of postal services in the political, economic, cultural development and people's lives of all countries, the Universal Postal Union passed a resolution at the 16th Congress held in 1969 to designate October 9 as "Upuu Day" every year, and asked members to organize various publicity and commemorative activities on the annual "UPU Day" from 1974 onwards. At the 19th Congress of the Universal Postal Union, held in 1984, a resolution was adopted to rename UPU Day to World Post Day in order to make the anniversary more widely influential.
The vigorous development of China's postal industry and telecommunications reflects the pace of China's accelerated fourth industrial revolution. But did you know that in the late Qing Dynasty more than 120 years ago, China's telecommunications business was controlled by Western powers, and the operators were all foreign companies. In the late Qing Dynasty, the government fought hard against them in order to fight for their rights.
Sheng Xuanhuai
In October of the last year of the nineteenth century, Sheng Xuanhuai, the minister of electricity supervision of the late Qing government, gave the Guangxu Emperor a recital:
"The re-German wind was created in Europe and the United States, and the telegraph is a tributary, such as the tributaries of the rivers and rivers, then the source of the water of the positive flow is small, and it is the delu wind that interferes with the telegraph. The new theory of the sunrise, the joy of human feelings, the difference between wisdom and foolishness, the difficulty of learning to translate, the use of hands, the sound of the ear, sitting in a room and can be a hundred friends, across the color and can be affectionate, this ancient has never been beneficial, so the creation of the line is not thirty years biased towards various countries. It began and ended for tens of miles, and can now be connected to thousands of miles. New opportunities cannot be prohibited. However, if they are different from the telegraph, the trickle of distribution accumulates over time and can break the positive flow. The Japanese telegraph and the German style are returned to the province, the students teach in one class, the machine comes from a factory, and I know that the power of affairs is inseparable. ”
The "german wind" here is the transliteration of the telephone at that time, to the effect that the telephone is used as a branch of the telegraph to facilitate the people and pass through various countries. We should take back the Japanese telegraph and telephone, train telecommunications talents, produce our own equipment, and recover the rights of interest.
Sheng Xuanhuai's heartfelt words made it a top priority to recover the right to telecommunications, which was considered from the perspective of national strategic security. In fact, his performance was only the tip of the iceberg that revealed the development of telephone and telegraph in our country at that time.
At that time, almost all of China's telecommunications business was in the hands of the Western powers. You may not believe that the main telecom operators in China in the late Qing Dynasty were all foreign companies! They are the Pacific Company of the United States, the Great East Company of the United Kingdom, the Mantetsu Company of Japan, the German-Dutch Company of Germany, and the Great North Company of Denmark.
The operators of these powers have torn apart our telecommunications territory, facilitating their aggression but threatening the security of our communications. They either occupy an area or collude to encroach on it. In the late Qing Dynasty, the government had to negotiate with them separately and fight for the right to profit little by little.
Like the previous article, Sheng Xuan conceived a fold to the Guangxu Emperor, which was supported by Li Hongzhang.
Li
As early as 1880, Li Hongzhang set up the General Telegraph Bureau in Tianjin and asked Sheng Xuanhuai to be the general office. In order to cultivate telegraph talents, Danish experts were hired to teach. It also entrusted the Danish Great North Company to purchase equipment and build a telegraph line between Tianjin and Shanghai.
It was this Great Northern Company, which colluded with the British Dadong Company, which had been spying on China's telecommunications industry for a long time, and when the Qing government was busy suppressing the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, it took advantage of the blockade of north-south communications and set up a sea line from Dagu to Shanghai, thinking that the invasion of the great powers would pass the news for the Eight-Power Alliance.
After Sheng Xuanhuai learned of this, he believed that the Pinghu line was the lifeblood of China's telecommunications and could not be controlled by the great powers, so he negotiated with two companies, Dabei and Dadong.
As a result, Shanghai to Dagu and Yantai to Dagu each, represented by two operators, the rest of the sea line and other things were bought by our China Telegraph Bureau, and the price was 250,000 pounds and 80,000 pounds after negotiation, as a telecommunications loan, together with interest, which was repaid in 30 years, and the previous unequal contract had to be extended!
After buying the telegraph line back, the Qing government immediately moved the General Telegraph Office from Tianjin to Shanghai, changed the General Office to the Superintendent, and officially supervised the Commercial Office. After the company took back its stake in telegraph in 1902, it was immediately changed to a government office. Yuan Shikai served as the minister of supervision, and Yang Shiqi was appointed as the deputy minister of electricity administration.
Yuan Shikai opened a radio training class in Tianjin in 1905, inviting Italian experts to teach. He also entrusted him to purchase marconi sudden fire extinguishing fancy radios on his behalf, installed them in Nanyuan, Baoding, Tianjin and other places and some warships, and used radios to communicate with each other, making contributions to China's coastal defense.
China's negotiations with the Japanese Mantetsu Company began in 1904. Because during the Russo-Japanese War, they occupied Our telegraph lines for military intelligence, and they also had to lay a new line from Dalian to Yantai. After four years of painstaking negotiations, it was only in 1908 that the electricity bureau and the line were recovered.
China's telecommunications business, starting from the establishment of China's first telegraph school in Fujian in 1875 by Fujian Inspector Ding Richang, gradually took back the wires erected by the great powers in China to run it himself; It was then expanded, and by the end of the Qing Dynasty, telegraph lines had spread throughout the provinces and began to take shape, which was the result of a hard struggle with Western operators. Let us pay tribute to China's early telecom people, but also cheer for the development of China's 5G network, and even more in the fourth industrial revolution of the private enterprises to show their fists and drums and clamor! (Zihua)