What's personal radio like in mainland China today?
Q. What's personal radio like in mainland China today? Do people have C.B. radios and cell phones?
A. C.B.'s, no, cell phones, yes. China's brutal collective dictatorship, otherwise known as Communism, limits personal technology. Mark van der Hoek (internal link, China pictures) and Geoff Fors (internal link, China pictures), both of whom have lived and worked in China, comment below.
Geoff Fors here. The main thing to remember about the country is that it is still communist and most aspects of daily life are controlled more strictly than other nations, although this is easing as the years go by. The idea of people having CB radios (internal link) is probably still scary to Chinese lawmakers. There are various dissident groups and troublemakers who could make good use of CB, so there isn't any CB. Of course now that everybody has a cell phone in China, you almost have the same thing, except that the government controls the network (not directly but politically speaking) and has the capability of monitoring any call they choose as well as tracing calls.
[Editor's note: Trying to crush the Solidarity movement, Soviet lackey Wojciech Jaruzelski disconnected Poland's telephone system when he declared martial law on December 13, 1981. Trade union organizers in different cities couldn't communicate for several days, amongst themselves or to the Polish people. The shutdown gave Jaruzelski time to round up dissidents and seize control. The sixteen month Solidarity experiment was stopped temporarily by, in part, turning off the public telephone system. A country could do the same thing today. But, you say, today we have the internet. True, but the internet uses the telephone system to connect itself. The internet is laid over the PTSN. Kill the telephone system and the internet in that country dies with it.]
"There are probably some factories producing CB radios for export. There are some private business radio systems, mainly UHF and above equipment, manufactured by Motorola and used by large corporate entities. The Chinese police on a local and national scale are converting to the new integrated Motorola Tetra digital radio system (external link to Tetra information). The present systems are FM and UHF analog plus a few VHF analog. Shanghai appeared to be all UHF. There are (usually) no radios in the police cars, they rely exclusively on hand-held units."
"There is amateur radio to a limited extent in China. Something like 10,000 licensed amateurs, most of whom use club stations. I can't lay my hands on a Chinese amateur frequency allocation chart at the moment but I believe they either have no 2 meter band or just a restricted 144-146 range allocation. There is UHF activity on the 432 MHz amateur band but most of it is not repeaters, just simplex. There are a few UHF repeaters, in the Beijing area. At the time I was there at the end of 2001, there were no UHF repeaters in the Shanghai area."
"Nearly all of the amateur gear in China is Japanese made, e.g. Kenwood, Yaesu, Icom, etc. and some rebranded equipment which seems to be made by Yaesu but labeled with a Chinese name. I recently saw some HF transceiver equipment which bears no resemblance to anything Japanese I am familiar with, which may be an actual Chinese made product ("Oriol" name) or it may be a Japanese domestic item which hasn't been sold in the United States."
"That's what I know about amateur, CB and business radio in China. Military radio is a different subject; I am in the process of compiling a web directory of Chinese military radios, 1949-80 + -, with photos and specs."
Regards, Geoff Fors
"Mark van der Hoek here. Cellular radio is all around China. GSM and CDMA are both used. My first project there was the deployment of a new CDMA system for a GSM operator. My second was for a CDMA operator. I heard of a possibility of an iDEN (Nextel type) system being put in Shanghai earlier this year, but I don't know if that project was completed. It would have been fairly small scale."
"Oh, what Geoff said about China producing look alike equipment. That's common over there -- a Chinese company partners with a foreign company and a plant is built to produce the foreign product with the Chinese firm's name on it. The product is exactly the original except for the name. Then the Chinese brag about what a great thing they've produced! "
Best, Mark van der Hoek