25-year-old editor Hu Sun last wrote to her family in central China's Hubei Province six years ago. Today she is busy working in Beijing all day long and contacts home mainly by telephone.

"I remember I wrote to my parents when I first entered university," said Hu at the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles Publishing Corporation.

"Now, I use my mobile phone, telephone and e-mail most often. It is much more convenient (than writing letters)," she said.

When telephone and the Internet entered the lives of the Chinese people, traditional "home letters," written in black and white, have been fading out.

In China's biggest city, Shanghai, the post office reported mail delivery of as many as 800 million letters of all kinds in 2004, and each Shanghai citizen received 60 letters on average.

However, private letters only accounted for less than 10 percent of the total, whereas the ratio was 90 percent a decade ago, the rest were all business letters and bills.

With the rapid development of modern information technology, telephones and e-mail have replaced mail carts.

Statistics show that the Chinese sent a total of 210 billion pieces of text messages in 2004, or nearly 600 million per day, and Chinese netizens rose to 103 million by June 30 this year.

"We prefer using telephones and e-mail," said Xu Qian, a junior at the Business School of the Wuhan University in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province.

"Many young people, like me, are not even clear about the correct format in writing a letter," he said. "Apart from home letters, we do not write love letters, either, which have also been substituted by text messages or email."

But the endangerment of letters has many people worried.

"For the sake of the country, for the sake of the nation, for the sake of our descendants, let's move to save the home letters! It is an urgent task!" A group of Chinese celebrities of the cultural circles, including Ji Xianlin, Ren Jiyu, have made the appeal in an open written proposal.

They proposed to launch a campaign to collect and save home letters scattered both at home and abroad. The campaign would target only paper letters, including the envelopes, no matter how long the letter was, or when or where it was written.

"Traditional home letters, as part of the outstanding folk culture of the Chinese nation, are a comprehensive carrier of literature, aesthetics, calligraphy, etiquette, packaging and papers," the proposal said.

"For thousands of years, they have been carrying forward the endless kindred culture of the Chinese nation, maintaining human true love and also faithfully recording the changes of times," it said.

The campaign, called "The Program of Saving Chinese Home Letters," has collected more than 15,000 letters since it was jointly started by the China National Museum and the Chinese Folk Literature and Art Society in early April this year.

"Seeing is meeting: that is the feeling a Chinese letter can bring to you while reading it," said 45-year-old Zhao Mei, a donator of home letters to the program.

"Communication this way is beyond description," said Zhao, adding that even today, she can still recall clearly the sweet feeling when she first read the love letter written to her by her then boyfriend.

"With turmoil of battle three months on end, a letter from home is worth a fortune in gold," said Du Fu (712-770), one of the most famous poets in the Tang Dynasty (618-907), expressing his desire for a home letter.

"Du's era has become the distant past, and more rapid and convenient modern communication tools have basically replaced the traditional way of contact," said Ding Zhang, secretary general ofthe "Program of Saving Chinese Home Letters."

"The decline of home letters will be an irreversible trend," hesaid. But Ding also pointed out a strange paradox: while communication has become more convenient, it has also made it less easy to effectively communicate emotions.

He explained that the Chinese are generally a people of implicitness and letters can express profound feelings, so letters were seen as a good way to convey feelings in the past.

"To save home letters is actually to save the traditional way of maintaining true love; to preserve home letters is actually to preserve the traditional Chinese humanistic spirit and traditional Chinese culture," he said.

Some sociologists argued that the replacement of letters by modern communications technologies is a measure of social development and progress and in fact reflects the clashes between modern and traditional values in the country. Therefore, "not writing home letters" cannot be blamed for lacking love and etiquette.

The younger Chinese generation have also voiced their resolution to employ modern technology to contact home, saying that the Internet and mobile phones are also able to convey feelings, only in a different manner than letters.

"Although I have not written to my parents for a long time, the true love between us has never weakened," said editor Hu Sun.

"One call, one text message can all the same convey the greetings and concerns to each other," she added.
 
(Xinhua News Agency September 14, 2005)