(Photo/Xinhua)

All administrative villages in China are expected to welcome express delivery services by 2022, according to the State Post Bureau (SPB), the country’s postal service regulator.

The bureau, together with other government departments, recently issued a guideline to leverage postal services and vitalize rural areas.

The central government’s infrastructure investment and specific local funds for rural vitalization should offer support for rural delivery infrastructure development, the guideline indicated.

There will also be delivery service outlets in every township across China, said Jin Jinghua, director of the Policy and Regulation Department of the SPB, adding that 74.9 percent of the country’s villages still don’t have rural e-commerce delivery stations.

Enterprises are encouraged to establish a whole-process cold-chain express logistics system covering production, processing, transportation, storage and sale of agricultural products, according to the guideline.

The country will also help villages to construct landing sites for drones and build demonstration areas for drone delivery.

China’s rural areas have become bright spots in the country’s development of the delivery sector and e-commerce growth.

In the first four months, express delivery business in the country’s rural areas grew by more than 30 percent year-on-year, over 7 percentage points higher than the growth within cities, contributing to the sales of more than 120 billion yuan worth of agricultural products.

The SPB’s data shows that China’s express delivery sector handled 4.9 billion parcels in April, up 31.1 percent year-on-year, and saw business revenue of 59.3 billion yuan, an increase of 26.8 percent year-on-year.

In the first four months of this year, business revenue rose by 22.8 percent year-on-year to 213.5 billion yuan, while the number of parcels handled grew by 24.8 percent from the previous year, up to 17.1 billion.