Mail services
The Chinese mail service is, on the whole, fast and reliable, with letters taking less than a day to reach destinations in the same city, two or more days to other destinations in China, and up to several weeks to destinations abroad. Overseas postal rates are becoming expensive; a postcard costs ¥1.6, while a standard letter is ¥2.2-6.7 depending on the weight. Ideally you should have mail franked in front of you. Express Mail Service (EMS) operates to most countries and to most destinations within China; the service cuts down delivery times and the letter or parcel is automatically registered.

Main post offices are open seven days a week, 8am-8pm; smaller offices may close earlier or for lunch, or be closed at weekends. As well as at post offices, you can also post letters in green postboxes , though these are few and far between except in the biggest cities, or at tourist hotels, which usually have a postbox at the front desk. Envelopes can be frustratingly scarce; try the stationery sections of department stores.

To send parcels , turn up at the main post office with the goods you want to send and the staff will help you pack them. You can buy boxes here, or your goods will be sewn into a linen packet like a pillowcase. You pay a few yuan for the packing service, but don't try to do it yourself, the staff will only unpack everything to ensure it is packed correctly. Once packed, but before the parcel is sealed, it must be checked at the customs window in the post office. In some parts of the country, especially the south, you'll find separate parcels offices near the post office. Parcel service from China is good and reliable, but there is masses of paperwork with forms in Chinese and French (the international postal language) only. If you are sending valuable goods bought in China, put the receipt in with the parcel as it may be opened farther down the line. A one-kilogram parcel should cost from around ¥50 for surface mail, ¥80 by air to Europe.

Poste restante services are available in any city. A nominal fee has to be paid to pick up mail, which will be kept for several months, and you will sometimes need to present ID when picking it up. Mail is often eccentrically filed - to cut down on misfiling, your name should be printed clearly at the top of the letter and the surname underlined, but it's still worth checking all the other pigeonholes just in case. Have letters addressed to you c/o Poste Restante, GPO, town or city, province. You can also leave a message for someone in the poste restante box, but you'll have to buy a stamp.

Phones and telecommunications
China's phone system is expanding rapidly and both international and domestic calls can be made with little fuss.

Local calls are free, and long-distance China-wide calls are fairly cheap, but international calls cost at least ¥16 a minute. Tourist hotels offer direct dialling abroad from your room, but will add a surcharge, and a minimum charge of between one and three minutes will be levied even if the call goes unanswered. You can also make IDD calls from streetside telephone shops (usually just a man with a telephone on a table). These usually charge by the minute, but always check in advance.

International calls can be efficiently made from telecommunications offices , usually located next to or in the main post office and open 24 hours. You pay a deposit of ¥200 and are told to go to a particular booth. When you have finished, the charge for the call is worked out automatically and you pay at the desk. You may find that a minimum charge for three minutes applies. Calls to Britain cost ¥15 per minute, to the US and Australia ¥18, and to Hong Kong ¥5. Alternatively, the business centres you'll find in most big hotels offer fax, telephone, Internet and telex services (as well as photocopying and typing), and you don't have to be a guest to use them - though prices for all these services are typically extortionate. Hotels also charge for receiving faxes, usually around ¥10 per page.

Card phones are now widely available in major cities. Cards come in units of ¥20, ¥50 and ¥100, and can be used only in the province where you buy them. They are the cheapest way to make long-distance calls as you are charged by the minute, but you will be cut off when your card value drops below the amount needed for the next minute, leaving you with a phonecard that can be used only to make calls within China.

Internet services are available in most major Chinese cities, with public terminals at many telecommunications offices, and even private Internet bars springing up around the place. They can be hard to find - you need to memorize the characters and pronunciation for intawang - but are also very cheap; telecom offices charge as little as ¥6 an hour, though mainland Internet bars are usually at least twice this and hotel business centres can ask for ¥100. Domestic interest is huge - pornography is particularly popular - and way outstrips available access, so download times can be achingly slow; it's not unknown to take an hour to read three letters.

The media
The Chinese news agency, Xinhua , is a national organization with an office in every province, a mouthpiece for the state which has a monopoly on domestic news. You can read their version of events in the China Daily, the only English-language newspaper , but it's scarce outside Beijing. The stories of economic success written in turgid prose may be numbing, but it also has a Beijing listings section and articles on uncontroversial aspects of Chinese culture. Other titles such as Beijing Review and Business Beijing are glossy publications, again very difficult to get hold of outside the capital, with articles on investment opportunities, the latest state successes, as well as interesting places to visit. In large cities you'll find copies of imported and uncensored publications such as Time, Newsweek and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Try Friendship Stores or big tourist hotels for these.

There is the occasional item of interest on Chinese television , though you'd have to be very bored to resort to it for entertainment. Domestic travel and wildlife programmes are common, as are song and dance extravaganzas, the most entertaining of which feature dancers performing in fetishistic, tight-fitting military gear while party officials watch with rigor-mortis grins. Soap operas and historical dramas are popular, and often feature a few foreign faces. Or you can watch twenty-year-old imported American thrillers and war films. Chinese war films, in which the Japanese are shown getting mightily beaten, at least have the advantage that you don't need to speak the language to understand what's going on. There is a thirty-minute English-language broadcast every night at 11pm on China Central Television Channel 4, showing features on aspects of Chinese life.

On the radio you're likely to hear the latest soft ballads, often from Taiwan or Hong Kong, or versions of Western pop songs sung in Chinese. The shortwave World Service frequency varies depending on where you are in the country and what time of day it is. Try 21660 KHz, 17760 KHz, 15360 KHz, 9740 KHz, 6195 KHz, or 5990 KHz.

Hong Kong has a good range of English-language newspapers including the South China Morning Post, the Hong Kong Standard and the Eastern Express. A number of international magazines - Time, Newsweek, Asian Wall Street Journal and USA Today - also produce Asian editions in Hong Kong. Surprisingly, all these have so far remained free (and openly critical of Beijing on occasion), despite the former colony's changeover to Chinese control.