One picture shows the relationship between China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom

Now China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom are competing with each other and are inseparable in business. But if you trace the history, you will find that they were originally separated from one company. To make it easier to understand, I drew a sketch.

At first, the postal service and telecommunications were one and the same, both belonging to the "Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications". Later, they were divided into the Postal Bureau and the Telecommunications Bureau, which later became "China Post" and "China Telecom". Now in many places, you can see the postal service next to the telecommunications service, and many telecommunications companies have even rented the storefronts of the postal service.

Later, the Telecommunications Bureau separated out its mobile communications business (excluding paging) and established "China Mobile". The paging business was divided as a whole to "China United Telecommunications Corporation", and the rest retained became "China Telecom".

Later, China Telecom was divided into two parts, the southern part and the northern part. The southern part inherited the China Telecom brand, and the northern part merged with other small telecommunications companies to become China Unicom.

As time goes by, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile have all expanded their business scope, breaking the original business divisions among the three, resulting in the current competitive situation caused by the overlapping businesses of the three.

I just briefly talked about the relationship between these three companies. In fact, there were many other telecommunications companies at that time. I searched on Baidu and a great person gave a very detailed answer. I have captured the picture here. If you are interested, you can take a look.