Mail to China (2022 temporary suspension)

[June060310]

@paulo

Unfortunately there isn’t yet much progress to tell about, but I want to give an update on how things are going.

I have spent some time graphing the average travel times of mail to China, as well as the amount of postcards delivered. This is how things look at the moment (click for bigger):

Just ensure that everyone has read this post. We are seems spending time with same solved questions over and over again.

And as the previous post said,

@Bille

We have all been using this site for years, mind you, without paying a fee for it.

We are all not in a position to make demands, the most we can do is ask for something.

But if that request cannot be fulfilled, and at the same time we are told why not, then we have to accept that.

Paulo spent time making a graph for us, though it’s not his duty to post the data on the forum.

[Izzy2018]

Instead of postmarks, you can look at a sample of Chinese member accounts and examine their received charts. These will show what mail has arrived in 2022 and how long the since the cards were mailed (around 2+ months), but it wont show how many cards to China are yet to be delivered. Paulo has that info and has previously posted that the number is in the thousands. He is waiting for the backlog to be cleared up. As it does members in China will receive lots of mail.

[noname13]

When I get a Chinese address in a tag, I always check the received cards. And it looks like many of these are now receiving cards sent in March, April and May.
One of my cards from a tag arrived after more than 3 months some days ago and the user wrote that she had no mail for 4 weeks and just got more than 50 cards at once. I checked her received cards then and most of the received cards she registered that day were from March and April.
Receiving mail from China seems to be faster, too. At least from my experience from tags and RRs.

So if most cards now arrive in August, then it should be possible to unsuspend mail to China soon. And then we’ll have to write many cards to China

[Izzy2018]

there is a preset number of official cards that members can send based on user level. You should have 8 slots based on this policy:

How many postcards can I send?

Your account of 30 sent & 25 received is quite balanced and as your postal system works through the backlog you should receive those 5 cards soon.

[varn]

As the only criterion for lifting the suspension, we’re locked in with the registration rate of the official postcards sent to China between mid-April and mid-June. This is equivalent to committing oneself to an even more tricky situation.

• If the suspension is lifted right now, considering many field reports of the improving postal service in China, then the suspension will only look unnecessary in the first place. Such consultation should’ve taken place way earilier.
• If the majority of those postcards are lost or aren’t registered within one year, then should we bail out?

Flexi-slots for postally unreliable destinations

No one expects the problems and troubles of postal services worldwide to be solved here, but in terms of managing user satisfaction, or in this case, user frustration, the address assignment and quota rules do play an important role. Inasmuch as people in other parts of the world are arranging private swaps with people in China, the official exchanges may incorporate that flexibility as well. So as I’ve written above, I echo the idea of creating a second category of slots for postally unreliable destinations. Granted, most likely only China will fall under this category should it be implemented. However, revisions of this sort seem to be future-proof.

@varn

First of all, contributors to the the topic about mail suspension alerts are doing an excellent job of keeping the Postal Monitor updated, which applies to origin-desination pairs. However, due to lack ot information from respective postal services, the Postal Monitor may not, and is not intended to in the first place, reflect the actual situation of postal routes or travel times.

Understandably, the all-important World Postcard Day is coming. Besides, a review of the address assignment and quota rules was not of high priority at the very beginning.

[Wilmariina]

@Cinher

Think about it, what would users do if something like this (almost block a whole country）happened in another country?

It has happened before (I’m showing one example here), is also happening in many other countries than just in China and I’m quite sure will happen many times in the future.

[English] Mail from Finland to Russia

Hi everyone! If you have postcards traveling to Russia right now, it’s very likely that they are taking longer than usual… and you should know that this is not normal. We have noticed that over the past weeks nearly no postcards from Finland are reaching their destinations in Russia. In fact, since around early July that nearly no postcards are being registered, going very quickly from an average of 500 postcards/week to single digit numbers! This means that there are now thousands of p…

[paulo]

We have been checking on this on a weekly basis, but it’s been about a month since the last update, so now is a good time for another update.

First, the good news: the pace of mail delivery seems to be picking up. Here’s the previous chart, but now with the data for July. For details on how to read the data in this chart, please refer to the previous post (click the chart for bigger):

If it holds at this level for another 2-4 weeks, we may reevaluate the situation.

Now for the not so great news. While some of the more recent mail is being delivered, it remains that only half (~51%) of mail sent ~4 months ago has arrived.

Moreover, for mail sent 2 months ago (≈China’s average travel time), only 17.5% has been delivered, which, while being an improvement from mid-June, is still unusually low. For some comparison terms, the equivalent values for Macao and Hong Kong are 72% and 85% respectively.

So, our main concerns:

1. the backlog doesn’t seem to be given priority: a significant part of mail sent 4-5 months ago (from today) is still not delivered, while some more recent postcards seems to be arriving already. We don’t know why this is happening, and at the rate that (older) mail is arriving it may take a few more months for it to finally reach the destination.

2. in part due to all the backlogged mail being delivered, the average travel times remain very high (last week had an average of 114 days) and it’s not clear yet whether it will return to anywhere near the previous values (which were already some of the longest in Postcrossing). If average travel times remain at ~4 months, exchanging postcards will be an even bigger patience exercise to say the least, specially for postcrossers in China which also need to account for long outbound travel times before postcards are sent back to them.

Some have pointed out that because Postcrossing suspended the route there are fewer deliveries to be made which can make it confusing to look at the data — we are aware of this. But right now there are still tens of thousands of postcards stranded somewhere and at a rate of delivery of less than 3k per week, there’s still quite a bit of backlog to go through. Moreover, only 10% of the postcards sent on the week we suspended this route have arrived so far, so I don’t think we are near the point where we need to worry too much with that, but we are keeping it in mind.

Lastly, when we introduced this temporary suspension, we had some hope that the problem would quickly sort itself out, specially with the end of the lockdowns in some bigger cities in China. Sadly, this is dragging longer than we hoped. Nonetheless, there are some positive signs in terms of rate of delivery, so hopefully things will keep heading in the right direction.

[HookedonPostcards]

Thank you @paulo for this recent update.

[varn]

Thanks for the update! I assume the update was sent to affected users in China via email or a note/link was added as a banner on their interface to update them simultaneously.

[June060310]

To share my joy:

As I posted before,

@June060310

we should go to the post office to take our mails by ourselves

This situation began in March and continued for a long time.
But today I actually received some postcards delivered to me, not fetching from the post office by myself! And the text on them wasn’t soaked with alcohol.
I think it may be caused by the policies of that “stop to do PCR test for and disinfect imported mails which wasn’t transported by the cold chain and left the country of origin for more than 24 hours”. Obviously postcards are this type of mails. (And thanks that they started to respect scientific facts a little more!) If the policy works, the speed of delivery will be faster.

But there is a confusing thing: Last time I went to the post office, I saw cards sent from foreign country (one of them is sent in January) to other receivers who shares a same address with me. They probably don’t know the situation of “ go to the post office to take our mails by ourselves”. But this time there is only my card delivered. Theirs aren’t here.

[Dr-K]

I received 2 cards from China ( Hebei) yesterday. They were sent on July 9th. Mine, sent on the 9th as well did not arrived, yet.
I do a lot of swapping with Chinese Postcrossers and, so far, all of the cards have arrived

[Norway_girl]

@Dr-K - Just for your information, the problem is mail TO China, not from China. Mail to China travels veeeery slow or doesn’t arrive at all. (From China, it’s just slow as usual).

[Dr-K]

This is definitely not the only country with long delays.
I was in Mexico and sent 7 cards from there, from the post office (including one to myself in Texas… bordering Mexico!), and none of them have arrived anywhere in the World. They are expiring on my profile (60 + days). So it is just the way it is right now and I don’t believe we should “banish” anybody. There are enough governmental postal closures already.
If our cards make it fast; we put a smile on someone’s face. If they arrive later, we will still make someone happy, just at a different time. But if we don’t send any, we sure won’t.
I didn’t believe it was a “race” to see who can get the most cards registered. I truly hope it isn’t.

Let’s just be friendly

[Herzmuschel]

You send cards from Mexico, not to Mexico. The problem are the cards send to China, not from China. Chinese Postcrossers are not banished. They can still participate and send cards from China but their addresses are not given out at the moment because there is an unusually huge amount of postcards already/still on their way to them. Think of it as the whole country being in inactive mode. (Able to request addresses but their own addresses are on hold until they are in active mode again). I hope the backlog clears soon and China can be in active mode again.

[Chris_sunshine]

I have a question what if only the card sent from February to March was lost. But sent after April ones are all delivered. Are we keep waiting for the data during February and March?

[Chris_sunshine]

For your opinion,not everyone willing to send without receiving.

[Robinchen]

But you will teceive cards. This suspension will not be forever. Paolo said best case in a month things will be back at normal. Once the world can send to China again you will receive all your due cards.

[meiadeleite]

@Chris_sunshine

I have a question what if only the card sent from February to March was lost. But sent after April ones are all delivered. Are we keep waiting for the data during February and March?

If postcards from a certain time period seemed lost but mail delivery after that period was back to normal, Postcrossing would resume delivery. See the case of mail from Finland to Russia in 2021 for an example of this happening before, and deliveries being resumed.

[elanlei]

But you already have lots of cards travelling to you, they are just taking a long time. It wouldn’t be fair to send even more.

[Herzmuschel]

But chinese postcrossers are receiving the postcards from the backlog. Many of wich are replacement cards for postcards already stuck there. So for one send card from China there are multiple cards on their way to China already. The only Members not having cards traveling to them yet are chinese Newbies, whose first card got registered during the suspension and who have their own country deactivated. But their addresses (and all others addresses) will be given out as soon as China is reactivated.