late 1980s (Mueller & Tan, 1997). On average, more than 10 million telephone lines were added to China's telecom network each year in the last decade. Total telephone lines in China reached 145 million in 2000. While China's telephone penetration rate was only 0.3 per 100 capita in 1980, it rose to 20.1 in the year 2000, as shown in Table 12. Many big cities and economically developed areas such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong have seen telephone penetration rates of 40-50%. The remote rural areas often lag behind with single-digit penetration rates.