About China Meteorological News

China Meteorological News

China Meteorological News (Chinese: 中国气象报; pinyin: Zhongguo Qixiang Bao) is a Chinese-language newspaper published in Beijing as the organ paper of the China Meteorological Administration (CMA), China's national weather service. It is produced by China Meteorological News Press (CMNP), an institution directly under the CMA, which the administration describes as a main force in meteorological news publicity — a platform for meteorological public opinion, an outlet for meteorological news, a means for meteorological service, a garden for meteorological popularisation and a position for meteorological culture. Read by forecasters, officials and emergency managers, the paper reports and explains the work of China's meteorological system for the system itself and for the professional audiences who depend on it.

Founded in 1989 by China Meteorological News Press

According to the CMA's own organisational page for China Meteorological News Press, China Meteorological News started publication in 1989, published by CMNP. The same official page describes the paper as published each Friday, with more than 70,000 domestic subscribers. That is the administration's own description of its newspaper, and it defines the title's character: a subscription paper for a professional system, distributed through the meteorological bureaus and related institutions of a large national service rather than sold as a general consumer daily.

Since 2007, CMNP has also been responsible for the Chinese and English website portals of the CMA. The press's remit therefore extends well beyond the printed paper. The CMA page lists CMNP as also responsible for the maintenance and development of the China Lightning Protection Information site, the China meteorological news image library and zgqxb.com.cn, presented as New Meteorology. The newspaper is thus the print core of a wider official meteorological media operation run by the same press.

The publisher's stated responsibilities

The CMA sets out what CMNP exists to do: timely reporting of meteorological work, following meteorological science and technology development, analysing severe meteorological disasters, popularising meteorological science and technology knowledge, serving the national economy and people's livelihood, and creating good public opinion for the scientific development of meteorological work. Each element of that list maps onto a recognisable part of the paper's content. Reporting meteorological work means covering the bureaus, observatories, projects and people of the CMA system. Following science and technology means tracking forecasting methods, observing systems and research. Analysing severe disasters means explaining typhoons, floods, droughts and other major events after — and while — they happen. Popularising knowledge means translating a technical science for wider understanding. A specialist organ paper is the natural home for all four tasks at once.

The administration behind the paper: the CMA

The China Meteorological Administration is the national weather service of the People's Republic of China, headquartered in Beijing. The agency was originally established in December 1949 as the Central Military Commission Meteorological Bureau; it replaced the Central Weather Bureau formed in 1941. In 1994, the CMA was transformed from a subordinate governmental body into one of the public service agencies under the State Council. That history explains the paper's late-1980s founding date: a modern, civilian public-service administration, reorganised in the reform era, acquired a dedicated news press and newspaper of its own at the end of that decade.

The system the paper serves is exceptionally large. Meteorological bureaus are established in 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities — excluding the separate meteorological services of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan — with further bureaus at sub-provincial and prefecture level and some 2,300 bureaus and stations at county level. Subordinate bodies under the CMA include the National Meteorological Center, the national central observatory, and the National Satellite Meteorological Centre. A newspaper that reports 'the work of provincial and county weather bureaus', as this one does, is reporting across that entire pyramid, carrying national policy and practice down to county stations and carrying local experience back up to the centre.

Coverage: forecasting, climate and disaster warning

The paper covers weather forecasting, climate monitoring and research, disaster warning for typhoons, floods and droughts, meteorological satellites and radar, and the work of provincial and county weather bureaus. It explains major weather events and climate policy for a professional audience and reports how meteorological services support agriculture, transport, energy and disaster reduction across China. That sector list reflects the CMA's own service responsibilities. The administration's stated functions include formulating meteorological policies, laws, development strategies and technical standards; participating in government decision-making on meteorological disaster prevention, preparedness and mitigation; organising joint trans-regional and inter-departmental prevention campaigns for major severe weather events; managing local weather modification operations; exercising management over national weather forecasts and warnings, short-term climate predictions and climate impact assessments; and organising major meteorological research projects and public outreach on meteorological knowledge.

For the paper's readers — forecasters issuing warnings, officials acting on them and emergency managers planning around them — coverage of that work is operational information, not background colour. An explanation of how a typhoon was forecast, how a warning was issued or how a drought assessment was reached is material its professional audience can use in its own work.

Satellites, radar and the observing system

Meteorological satellites and radar are a standing part of the paper's beat because they are a standing part of the CMA's work, administered through bodies such as the National Satellite Meteorological Centre. China's Fengyun meteorological satellite programme is the best-known element of that system internationally. CMA reporting on the launch of Fengyun-4C on 27 December 2025 — the latest member of the second-generation geostationary Fengyun-4 series at that time, launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center — recorded that a total of 23 Fengyun meteorological satellites had been launched, with 10 currently in orbit, delivering data products and services to 133 countries and territories worldwide. Developments of that kind — new satellites, new data products, new observing capability — are core news for this paper's readership of forecasters and bureau staff, whose daily work depends on the observing network the satellites sustain.

Science popularisation and meteorological culture

The CMA's description of CMNP gives unusual prominence to popularisation and culture, and the wider meteorological community treats the newspaper as a source for both. When the Chinese Meteorological Society marked its centenary — it was established on 10 October 1924 in Qingdao — with three books released in November 2024 on its history, on atmospheric research and on meteorological science popularisation, the popularisation volume included articles from the magazine Meteorological Knowledge and from the newspaper China Meteorological News. A trade paper whose explanatory articles are selected for a learned society's centenary collection on popularisation is performing the 'garden for meteorological popularisation' role its publisher claims for it. For general professional readers, that explanatory function matters alongside the news function: the paper is one of the places where China's weather science is rendered intelligible in Chinese to non-specialists in adjacent fields.

Climate discourse: what a 2026 study of the paper found

The paper has itself become an object of academic research. A study published in Frontiers in Communication in 2026 examined China's climate change discourse through an analysis of 9,018 articles from China Meteorological News published between 2011 and 2025, combining BERTopic topic modelling with discourse-historical critical discourse analysis. The study describes CMN, launched in 1989 and affiliated with the CMA, as remaining the CMA's primary official news outlet. It identified three core discursive dimensions in the paper's climate coverage — political–strategic, scientific–technological and service–application — which together frame climate governance as a state-led, governance-oriented project, and found that the political–strategic and service–application dimensions dominate, with discourse over time shifting toward a more service-oriented and application-driven configuration. For researchers, that finding makes the paper a documented primary source: fifteen years of its climate articles are large and consistent enough to sustain quantitative study of how official China talks about climate change.

Readership, use and place in the system

The paper's readership is professional: forecasters, meteorological officials, emergency managers and the staff of the provincial, prefectural and county bureaus that make up the CMA system, together with researchers who study Chinese weather and climate communication. Its more than 70,000 domestic subscribers, in the CMA's own description, are best understood against that system rather than against mass-circulation consumer newspapers. Its value to outside readers and historians lies in its position. As the CMA's primary official news outlet, published by the administration's own news press since 1989 and paired since 2007 with the same press's stewardship of the CMA's Chinese and English web portals, it records how China's national weather service presents its forecasts, its disasters, its technology and its climate policy to itself and to the wider professional world.