China's postal agency launched a new service this week that will enable computer users to have e-mails delivered in hard-copy form to recipients who don't have e-mail. The e-mails will be printed out by postal employees, placed into envelopes, and sent with the rest of the mail to the sender's assigned destination.

	See also:
•	A Human Rights Site? In China?
•	China Sweet, Sour on Spam
•	Not All Asian E-Mail Is Spam
•	Everybody's got issues in Politics
•	Keep an eye on Privacy Matters

Oh, and it won't be read by anyone. A spokeswoman for China Post says so.

"Mail is a private matter," the spokeswoman says. "There would be no reason for anybody to read it."

No reason, indeed. Even the Chinese regime's own followers assume that, in a nation where the government asserts that the open exchange of opinions will cause societal instability, somebody at China Post will be reviewing what is passed along.

This is, after all, a nation that blocks most major Western news media Internet sites, including CNN, the BBC, Voice of America and The Washington Post.

AOL member sites are also inaccessible in an effort to minimize the public's exposure to alternative views on Tibet, Taiwan, Falun Gong and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

And hundreds of Internet cafes are shut down each year for failing to put filters on computers that would keep users from looking up information on those hot-button political topics and from viewing sexually explicit material.

"All the Chinese know that their mail can be opened and read at any time anyway, so we must assume they will look this over, too," says Xu Jun, a political science professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. "Why wouldn't they? What if there was something in a letter that the government should object to?"

Nonetheless, the concept of a hybrid of e-mail and snail mail is intriguing in a vast nation where 34 million people have Internet access -- and more than 1.2 billion do not. This "mixed mail service," as dubbed by China Post, will at first allow domestic letter-writers to send mail to recipients in 18 major cities.

Yet just as the Internet itself is prohibitively expensive for the Chinese public, mixed mail service won't be cheap either. Users, expected to be mainly small businesses and entrepreneurs at first, must spend almost $60 for special software from the post office and buy a prepaid usage card of about $4 in "e-postage," the spokeswoman said.

That software enables the user to send the e-mail to China Post at any time of day. A postal employee prints it out during the next business day and charges 25 cents to print and deliver the first page. Additional pages cost another 6 cents each, but there's a three-page maximum.

The China Post spokeswoman seemed excited about the venture, but the agency's Chinese-language website mentioned it only vaguely in a confusing diagram. Personnel at two different branches in Shanghai last weekend said they'd never heard of the service, even though China Post claimed to have started offering it in that city last year in a test run.