Ballpoint pens are not popular in a large area in China, and my personal guess should be the issue of archival requirements. If you ask an elderly office worker of a state-owned enterprise, many of them will tell you to use a gel pen to fill in the form, because the content written in a ballpoint pen will fade and become invisible after a long time. In fact, there are two kinds of standards for ballpoint pens in the world. One is that it can be archived, and it is not easy to fade; I estimate that in the early years, the domestic ballpoint pen ink was not related to the problem of fading, so in the early years, the fountain pen was required to fill in. Later, when the gel pen mainly based on pigment ink appeared, the gel pen was required to fill in. Under the requirements of state-owned enterprises and government agencies, gel pens are naturally popular, and ballpoint pens have been marginalized.
