Monopoly

A month after I activated this pre-paid cell phone card and more than a year before it's expiration date, it stopped working with over 30% of its value left. After the dial tone the only thing you can hear is "your pre-paid phone card has expired". China Telecom, the largest Chinese public communication company and the only one allowed to provide land line service and the one who just got the entire business of 2008 Beijing Olympics, is the absolute No. 1 monopoly throughout this entire country thanks to its bond with the government.China Mobile, one of the only two companies which provide mobile phone service in China, is actually part of China Telecom and not surprisingly, is surpported by the government to bully all competition. China Mobile is actually the one who got the Olympics contract, but we can symply save the trouble and call it China Telecom.

Put in a short way, China Telecom is even worse than Microsoft. The latter, at least, is not backed up by the government in any way and their monopoly is based on their own product.

So my pre-paid cell phone fee is down the toilet and since I am not insane I am not going to argue with China Mobile about this. This interesting phenomina has been around for so many years: nearly everyone hates China Telecom and China Mobile, yet they are still in excellent business. Recently the government has just passed a new law banning any company to charge only the caller for mobile communication and banning anyone from lowering service price without government (pronounced as "China Mobile") approval. Meanwhile after state exams, examinees need to call China Telecom's info service to know their scores and the service fee is 5RMB per minute, which is even more expensive than international calls. But you just have to call and pay for it unless you do not really wanna know. And just another pieces of news was on TV yesterday: China Telecom refuses to provide detailed phone bill records to customers due to "technical reasons"(pronounced as "you-are-stupid"), instead everyone can only see the total amount and man if you do not pay in time, your phone is cut off right away. My mom saw this happen once with no warning at all.With more and more Chinese people getting online, broadband internet service is so booming and there are a mumber of companies providing subscriber service but you don't wanna waste your time guessing who is the winner: China Telecom's ASDL serivce. There are companies providing T1 to the living room for less than half the price but you simply cannot get it because they are not allowed to enter certain areas of the city - maybe just the populated areas, all other places are open to fair competition for everyone.

This has been on the media recently: up till now less than 10 counties recognize China as a market economy and no major economic body is on that list. Both the EU and the US refuses to see China as a market economy and Chinese am I, I think they are absolutely right.

It has been so boring these days and even I am writing this stuff.

《南方周末》 反垄断法：现实与期望