“As a deputy from the grassroots, I was extremely excited and inspired when walking into the Great Hall of the People and listening to the government work report on the spot for the first time,” Guo Honggang, a deputy to the 14th National People's Congress and rural mail carrier of Xingtai Postal Branch in Hebei province, said to the reporter passionately on the phone.

Guo Honggang, who has been working as a mail carrier since 2002, is responsible for delivering mail to offices and 21 administrative villages in three townships, traveling on his mail route over 300 days every year. He wins the villagers’ trust with his sincere service and is known as the “affectionate post office on motorbike”. “Traveling on the mail route every day, I meet the villagers, chat with them and then know what they need. Therefore, I will speak out for the general public and their wellbeing at the two sessions (the annual sessions of the National People's Congress and the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference),” Guo Honggang said.

Attending the two sessions for the first time, Guo Honggang put forward two proposals concerning leveraging the advantages of postal service to serve the people’s livelihood. The government work report noted that the government has strengthened rural infrastructure such as water, electricity and gas supplies, roads, and mail and communications services in the past five years. As a rural mail carrier, Guo Honggang delivers newspapers, periodicals and mail items every day and has a deep understanding of the villagers’ needs for postal service. Therefore, Guo Honggang proposed that government should intensify policy support in terms of universal postal service to effectively secure the basic rights of the rural and urban residents for communications. In the meantime, the government should intensify policy support in terms of the construction of postal outlets in remote rural areas so as to improve the capacity of basic public services in rural areas.

As a primary-level mail carrier, Guo Honggang deeply understands the impact of the express and logistics industry on people’s lives. He said, “Access to postal service is the basic right of the general public. However, they now have far higher demands than this. For example, they need convenient online shopping and government services accessible in villages. China Post can play an important role in these aspects.” Thereby, Guo Honggang proposed that government should make unified plans and include facilities such as cooperative distribution centers at county and township levels and convenience service stations at villages in public service infrastructure. On the basis of direct post services reaching all administrative villages nationwide, government should make plans to add more convenience services to postal outlets and ULE stations and facilitate more postal services to reach down to villages. Government should also play a leading role in establishing a joint mechanism between government and enterprises to facilitate postal enterprises to be deeply engaged in serving farmers’ cooperatives and other new types of agribusiness through joint research and working together.