A man holds a brick-like cell phone which was a symbol of wealth and social status in the 1990s. [File photo: daynews.com.cn]

Thanks to China's reform and opening up policy that was introduced in 1978, more Chinese people could afford to make phone calls, although the development of telecommunications facilities lagged far behind demand.

To talk to relatives or friends living in other cities, citizens had to wait in long lines for hours outside public telephone offices. Yet, when they were able to finally make calls, there was always a chance that their long-distance calls would not go through.

When one person finally entered the office and picked up the phone, he only heard the voice of an operator who was responsible for transferring phone calls between different regions. If the limited number of lines connecting to the other cities were all busy, unlucky callers would have to wait another few hours.

In the 1990s, however, the situation had improved markedly. More telephone booths were installed on city streets, while some households began to enjoy the convenience brought by private telephones. A few wealthier people even bought their own cellular phones.

Wang Lei, a merchant in Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi Province, bought his first cell phone for 20,000 yuan (US$2,900 today) in 1994. At that time, the average annual income of Chinese residents was only about 3,000 yuan.

"Now it looks like a big and heavy brick, but at that time, it made me feel very proud," Wang said about his first mobile phone. But because of expensive phone fees, some cell phone owners seldom used their handsets for communication, buying them instead as a status symbol to show off to their friends and family members.

As the world entered the new century, mobile phones no longer were viewed as status symbols, but necessities in Chinese people's daily lives. In 2003, during the seven-day Spring Festival holiday, 7 billion text messages were sent to express people's good wishes for the Chinese New Year.

By the end of this July, the number of mobile phone users in China surpassed 700 million to rank the country as No. 1 in the world in terms of mobile phone use, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.