The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the People`s Republic of China has awarded contracts worth 2 billion yen to nec Corp. (Tokyo) and Marubeni (Tokyo) of Japan for construction of a fiber-optic network. The 4000-km network represents the largest project under China`s current five-year plan to improve telecommunications infrastructure and will link the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region through such cities as Guilin and Luoyang. The network will have a capacity of 10 Gbits/sec split over four 2.5-Gbit/sec circuits.