Experience writing an article in a Chinese newspaper

I once worked for a Chinese company manufacturing mobile phones and other electronics, and a letter came in the mail inviting me to write an article in a local newspaper. The company was one of China's leading manufacturers of telecommunications equipment, and the newspaper was its domestic media. It is published in English, and it is handed out free of charge in the offices of all countries where it has representative offices.

In my opinion, it turned out quite funny, if you take into account the illustrations.


The article asked to write a story on the topic of wireless communications in remote corners of the country. The tone of the invitation was almost appealing, and one could understand that no one wanted to do this, and the newspaper clearly lacked material on this topic. And an idea came to my mind that perfectly fit the topic of the article. In this situation, I decided to help my Chinese colleagues.

The combination of remote villages and high technology illustrates this image well.



In the article, I wrote that in remote areas of Russia it is difficult to pull a wired connection due to the vast distances and climate, and mobile technologies will be very useful there. Since the equipment of this company is one of the cheapest, there it could be in demand.

Then a second illustration was found about the current state of communications in distant villages.



But can they publish an article with such not very serious illustrations?

And so, after some time, the answer came that they could publish my article, said “thank you very much” and sent an electronic version of the newspaper. Click on image to enlarge. The text is not very complicated, the article is not big. Cross-country communication In Russia and many other countries the countryside communications were always a big problem. For distant Russian rural places it's hard to bring a good phone line or any communication lines, here you can deal with huge distances and rough terrain with lots of forests and lakes.











The solution surely comes from wireless communication networks.
The reason that country people use mobile devices is not only dependency from wires but also the better voice quality. If you have ever tried to use landline in a distant village, you know what I'm talking about.
And the other reason for using mobile devices in rural places is Russian weather. It makes building and maintenance of landlines more difficult.
Villagers usually don't have money for expensive mobile phones so they choose most simple mobile devices. Now mobile networks spread pretty wide so you can buy a SIM and payment card in a small country shop.
Our mobile terminals have very good price and affordability so many country people choose your devices even if they need to go for many kilometers to the city to buy them.
Mobile communications for the countryside is not only phone calls but also wireless local networks and of course Internet. So lots of villagers begin using 3G modems in their daily life. There's not much entertainment in distant villages so people spend their free time browsing the network, sending E-mails, using instant messengers or playing online games.
So our mobile equipment gives rural people the joy of ability to use such important service as phone calls and allows using the Internet.

As a reward for the article, they paid for it in RMB. 180 yuan, which amounted to almost 1000 rubles, which then was very difficult to obtain, since foreign employees did not transfer money through the bank. The name “Cross-country” is usually written with a dash, but I had a Chinese editor, and Asian English is a separate topic. Indeed, the article was printed, even despite comic illustrations. I managed to publish an article in a real English-language newspaper. As it turned out, not only I excelled: someone published in his article a black man speaking on a cell phone with a television antenna. Not to say that it was a particularly lucrative occupation - getting a fee for it was worth a lot of problems. I had to ask a Chinese colleague to bring a fee in cash from China.





Somewhere about a week later an article appeared in paper form.