About Guiyang Evening News

Guiyang Evening News

Guiyang Evening News (Chinese: 贵阳晚报; pinyin: Guiyang Wanbao) was the main Chinese-language evening newspaper of Guiyang, Guizhou, published by the Guiyang Daily media group. Founded on 26 May 1980, it grew into the largest and most influential newspaper in the provincial capital, covering economy, society, livelihood and education news for city readers. On 31 December 2021 it announced the suspension of its print edition after a total of 8,235 issues; from 1 January 2022 the title continued as a digital newspaper distributed free through the Guiyang News Network, the Guiyang Toutiao app and its official WeChat account.

A paper born as a party organ

The paper's origins are bound up with the history of Guiyang's party press. The Guiyang Daily, the organ of the Guiyang Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, had been founded in August 1958 and ceased publication in January 1961. When a municipal party paper was again established in Guiyang, it took evening form: the Guiyang Evening News was founded on 26 May 1980 and itself became the organ of the Guiyang municipal party committee. It thus began not as a commercial sideline but as the official newspaper of the capital of Guizhou, at the opening of the reform era, when evening papers were being founded or revived across China as the press expanded beyond the bare party-organ model of the preceding decades.

Guiyang, the city it served

Guiyang is the capital of Guizhou, a mountainous province in southwest China long counted among the country's poorer regions, and the city's political, commercial and cultural centre. For such a capital, the municipal paper was a central institution: the channel through which city policy reached residents and through which the life of the city — its markets, schools, hospitals, construction and neighbourhoods — was recorded. The Guiyang Evening News grew with the city through the decades of reform-era expansion, and public accounts of its record describe it straightforwardly as the largest and most influential newspaper in Guiyang, a standing it held among the province's city papers.

Coverage and character

Accounts of the paper summarise its fields as the economy, society, people's livelihood and education. That is the classic brief of the Chinese evening paper: less concerned with the formal record of party and government than its morning organ counterpart, and more concerned with the practical texture of urban life — prices and markets, jobs and wages, schooling, health care, housing, transport and the social questions thrown up by a fast-changing city. In a province undergoing rapid urbanisation, with Guiyang drawing population and investment from across Guizhou, such coverage made the evening paper the everyday companion title of the capital's press, read for what it told residents about their own city.

The 2000 reorganisation

On 1 April 2000 the structure of Guiyang's party press was regularised: the Guiyang Daily was restored, and with it the Daily's status as the organ of the municipal party committee. The Guiyang Evening News ceased to be the committee's organ but continued publication in its own right — a transition many Chinese evening papers made in the same period, exchanging formal political rank for a clearer identity as the group's city-life and commercial title. The paper's survival of the change, rather than absorption into the restored daily, reflected the readership and standing it had built over its first twenty years.

The Guiyang Daily Media Group

In 2008 the Guiyang Daily Media Group was established, grouping the capital's party papers and their developing media operations under one organisation. The Guiyang Evening News continued as one of the group's principal newspapers, alongside the Guiyang Daily, while the group built the digital outlets — the Guiyang News Network and the Guiyang Toutiao app among them — through which the city's news would increasingly be delivered. The evening paper's later history, including its eventual move online, was worked out inside this group structure.

The economics of decline

The paper's final print years coincided with the collapse of the Chinese metropolitan newspaper economy. Industry surveys cited by the China Media Project and the Lingua Sinica newsletter record that Chinese newspaper advertising peaked in 2011 and then fell steeply — by 2021 it had shrunk to a small fraction of its peak — with metropolitan and evening papers hit hardest, their commercial advertising dropping by more than seventy percent in the accounts of some papers and subscription and newsstand sales in major cities falling by roughly half in the mid-2010s alone. Evening papers, whose function of summing up the day was taken over by phone-based news, and whose readers were increasingly served free through apps and social platforms, were the most exposed titles in most press groups' portfolios.

The print suspension of 2021–22

On 31 December 2021 the Guiyang Evening News published a "To Readers" announcement: the print newspaper would be suspended, its run closing at 8,235 issues, and from 1 January 2022 it would appear instead as a digital newspaper — a "revision and upgrade", in the announcement's terms — distributed free of charge through three platforms: the Guiyang News Network, the Guiyang Toutiao app and the paper's official WeChat account, with news released in the form of news flashes and posters. The paper was one of at least eight Chinese newspapers and magazines that issued suspension announcements on the same day, the turn of 2021–22 having become a customary date for such decisions; reports of the wave listed the Guiyang title alongside evening papers from Yibin and Bazhong and several other provincial titles.

Life as a digital newspaper

The continuation was more than a website bearing an old name. The announcement specified the channels and the free model: readers would receive the Guiyang Evening News as a digital newspaper within the group's news network and app, and through WeChat, the platform on which much of China's local news consumption had come to take place. The title's newsroom functions — covering the capital's economy, society, livelihood and education — passed into the group's converged operation, where the evening paper's brand stood for city news in digital form. Guiyang reporting credited to the Guiyang Evening News continued to circulate through these channels after the print run ended.

Assessment and legacy

The Guiyang Evening News ran in print for more than forty-one years, from May 1980 to the end of 2021, publishing 8,235 issues. Its career traces the full arc of the Chinese evening paper: founded as a party organ in the early reform period, grown into its city's largest and most influential newspaper, repositioned in 2000 when the morning organ was restored, housed in a media group from 2008, and finally transferred wholly to digital publication when print economics failed. For Guiyang it was, across those decades, the capital's own paper of record for everyday life, and its documented passage from organ to evening daily to digital title makes it a compact case study in how China's municipal press adapted — and what of it survived the adaptation.

The title's digital afterlife is visible in the record. Guizhou and national reporting in the years after the print suspension continued to credit the Guiyang Evening News as the source of Guiyang news — for example in 2025 coverage of national heritage-list announcements originating in the city — and the Guiyang Daily Media Group continued to operate from its Newspaper Building headquarters at 25 Zhongshan East Road, as its public notices record. The evening paper thus persisted as a working news brand of the group, its name carrying the authority it had accumulated over 8,235 printed issues into the group's digital output.