About Wuhai News Net

Wuhai News Net

Wuhai News Net is the official online news portal serving Wuhai, a prefecture-level city in western Inner Mongolia, China. Published in Chinese, it carries local government, economy, society, livelihood and culture news for Wuhai and its three districts, and it is the city's dedicated local news website, produced by Wuhai's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting group. It is distinct from the print Wuhai Daily newspaper, whose reporting it carries alongside online-first local coverage and local government service information.

Wuhai is the smallest prefecture-level city in Inner Mongolia and one of the youngest: a coal city created in 1976 on both banks of the Yellow River, between the Gobi and Ordos deserts. Its portal reports on a compact city of about half a million people that has added a desert lake, a grape and wine industry and a "city of calligraphy" identity to its mining foundations.

The portal and its place in Wuhai media

Wuhai News Net is the web flagship of the city's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting organisation. It publishes the newsroom's reporting continuously online, together with official announcements and government service information, as Wuhai's dedicated local news website and the standing digital record of the city's public affairs.

It is distinct from Wuhai Daily, the centre's print newspaper, whose journalism it carries and extends with online-first stories, photography, video and service pages. In China's prefecture-level media structure, newspaper and broadcasting groups have in recent years been merged into converged media centres publishing across print, broadcast, web and mobile channels from a single newsroom, and Wuhai's centre works in that pattern.

The site operates as a licensed internet news information service under the framework administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China. Wuhai's small scale gives its portal a particular intimacy: three districts, one river and one newsroom, covering a city where most readers live within a short drive of the stories they read.

A young city on both banks of the Yellow River

Wuhai covers just 1,754 square kilometres — the smallest prefecture-level division in Inner Mongolia by area — with a permanent population of about 0.55 million. It lies in the west of the autonomous region on the upper Yellow River, which flows through the city, between the Gobi Desert to the west and the Ordos Desert to the east, close to Ordos, Alxa and Ningxia.

The city is a deliberate creation. Wuhai became a single city occupying both banks of the Yellow River with the amalgamation in 1976 of Wuda on the left, western bank — then administered by the Bayan Nuur League — together with Haibowan on the right, eastern bank, then administered by the Ikh Juu League. The State Council approved the merger in 1975, and the unified city was officially established in 1976, directly governed by Inner Mongolia. Wuhai is also noted for a geographical curiosity: its antipode, almost exactly on the opposite side of the earth, is the inhabited Chilean city of Valdivia.

Three districts, one river

Wuhai is divided into three districts. Haibowan, on the eastern bank, is the municipal seat and the city's commercial and political centre. Wuda, across the river on the western bank, grew as a coal settlement founded in the late 1950s. Hainan District, to the south, was added under its present name in 1979, when the former Lamazhao administration was renamed.

The first major bridge across the Yellow River, opened in 1988, physically bound the two banks together, and later bridges and the riverside cityscape completed the union the 1976 merger had declared. The portal's coverage follows that compact geography: district news from Haibowan, Wuda and Hainan appears in one service, and a story about the river — water levels, bridges, lakeside development — is a story about the whole city at once.

Coal, chemicals and the drive beyond coal

Wuhai rose from coal. The city is rich in mineral resources, and its high-quality coking coal accounts for a large share — put at 75 per cent — of Inner Mongolia's reserves of that grade. Coal mining, electric power generation, metal-working and chemical industries built the city, with the Zhuozishan mining district, founded in 1955, forming the industrial core of what became Haibowan.

The portal's economic reporting now follows the turn beyond raw coal. Over the decade from 2012 to 2021 the city once dubbed the "Western Coal City" pursued high-quality, eco-friendly industrial development: eliminating outdated capacity, pushing coal chemicals towards high-end, value-added products and new materials, investing heavily in infrastructure, and putting the region's first hydrogen refuelling station into use. Titles such as National Greening Model City, National Garden City and National Water Ecological Civilization City mark the change — and the tension between pit, plant and environment remains a standing local story.

Wuhai Lake and the desert shore

The city's emblematic project is Wuhai Lake. The Yellow River's Haibowan Water Control Project dammed the river through the city, creating a lake of about 118 square kilometres — a "sea in the desert" where water meets the dunes of the Ulan Buh Desert. The city is described as surrounded by three mountains with a river through it, and known as the Pearl of the Yellow River.

Lakeside development has reoriented Wuhai's image from mining town to desert-lakeside tourism: shoreline parks, water sports and views across to the dunes. For the portal, the lake is a permanent beat — water management, tourism seasons, ecological results and the continuing work of keeping a desert city's shore green.

Grapes, wine and desert farming

Alongside coal, Wuhai built an improbable second fame: grapes. Rich resources of water, soil, light and heat make the city a grape production base compared with Xinjiang's Turpan region, and a number of its grape varieties have won national awards. Desert wineries produce wines from grapes grown in sandy soils along the river, and the city counts itself one of China's important grape bases.

Fruit and dairy farming round out the agricultural picture. The portal's rural coverage follows the harvests and winery economy of the riverside districts — a counterpoint, in the same news list, to mine output and chemical prices, and a sign of how deliberately Wuhai has diversified the identity of a resource city.

The city of calligraphy

Wuhai's third identity is cultural. The city is known as a city of calligraphy: it counts dozens of members of the Chinese Calligraphers Association — 31 by one city account, with 125 more in the Inner Mongolia association — and a very large body of year-round practitioners, put at more than 100,000 fans of the art in a city of half a million. It has won the titles of Chinese calligraphy city and Chinese hard-tipped pen calligraphy city.

Calligraphy exhibitions, schools and competitions are therefore real local news, covered by the portal alongside industry and environment. Football commentator and television host Huang Jianxiang, one of China's best-known sports voices, was also born in Wuhai — a footnote the city's culture pages are fond of.

What the portal publishes

Day to day, Wuhai News Net publishes the full range of a prefecture news service in miniature: municipal government and party affairs, policy announcements and official notices; economy and industry news from coal, power, chemicals and the new materials and hydrogen sectors; agriculture and tourism news from the lake, the desert shore and the vineyards; society and livelihood coverage of schools, hospitals and city services; and culture news centred on calligraphy and the city's festivals.

It also carries the service information residents use — recruitment and examination notices, road, weather and river information, and announcements from city departments — and extends the converged media centre's newspaper and broadcast reporting with online-first updates through the day. Transport is part of that service picture: Wuhai lies on the Baotou–Lanzhou railway along the Yellow River, and Wuhai Airport, opened in 2003, links the city to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other cities.

Digital services, licensing and readership

Like other Chinese prefecture portals, Wuhai News Net operates within the national licensing system for internet news information services, administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which governs which organisations may gather and publish news online. Its authority rests on that licence and on its place inside the official municipal media group.

Its readers are Wuhai's own half-million residents across three districts, together with former residents and business readers elsewhere in Inner Mongolia and Ningxia who follow the coal, chemical and grape economy. In that role — noticeboard, newsroom and archive in one — Wuhai News Net is the standing digital record of Inner Mongolia's smallest and youngest prefecture city.