About 21jingji

21jingji

21jingji is the online news service of the 21st Century Business Herald, one of China's most influential professional finance newspapers, based in Guangzhou, Guangdong. Published in Chinese at 21jingji.com, the site carries the newspaper's financial and business reporting on macroeconomics, capital markets, companies and regional economies, alongside data and video products. The parent newspaper, the 21st Century Business Herald (21世纪经济报道), was launched by Shen Hao on 1 January 2001 as part of the Nanfang Daily Media Group, and since November 2016 it has belonged to the Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group. Few Chinese business titles have been as closely watched — for the quality of their market reporting, for the media group they helped to build, and for the scandal that struck their leadership in 2014. 21jingji is where that newspaper now meets most of its readers: a continuously updated finance news service for investors, executives and officials following the world's second-largest economy from its southern commercial capital.

From a weekly launch to a business daily

The newspaper behind the website was officially launched by Shen Hao on 1 January 2001 as a weekly newspaper, part of the Nanfang Daily Media Group — the Guangzhou-based group around Nanfang Daily that built some of China's most market-oriented journalism. The Herald grew from that weekly start into a business-news daily published five times a week on weekdays. Its launch date was itself a statement: a newspaper named for the new century, founded on the first day of 2001, in the city that had been China's trading window for centuries, aimed at the business readership created by two decades of reform and opening. The website that became 21jingji carries that founding identity into digital form — the name itself shortens the paper's Chinese title, 21st Century Economic Reporting, into a web address.

Sister titles and the growth of a business media family

In its first years the Herald spawned a family of outlets under its umbrella, including Moneyweek, the 21st Century Business Review and Global Entrepreneur, together with its web presence at 21cbh.com. That structure mattered to what 21jingji became: a finance brand that was never only a newspaper, but a set of linked products for different depths of business reading — daily market news, weekly money coverage, management review and entrepreneurial reporting. The online service inherited that range. Its recorded remit today is the newspaper's reporting on macroeconomics, capital markets, companies and regional economies, extended with data and video products that print cannot carry — the natural digital form of a multi-title business publisher.

Inside the Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group

On 17 November 2016, the Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group was established, described as China's first omnimedia group. The 21st Century Business Herald was affiliated to the new group on that date, together with related print media, websites, radio and television outlets and social media outlets. For 21jingji, the change placed the Herald's digital service inside a finance-specialised media conglomerate rather than a general newspaper group: its sister products are financial media, and its home city, Guangzhou, is the commercial capital of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. The site's coverage reflects that position, with regional economy reporting on Guangdong and the Greater Bay Area standing alongside its national macroeconomic and markets coverage.

What 21jingji covers

The site's recorded coverage spans four core beats. Macroeconomics: growth, policy, trade and the data by which China's economy is judged, reported for readers who act on it. Capital markets: the Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong exchanges, bonds, funds and the listed-company news that moves them. Companies: the strategies, results and governance of China's major firms, in the Herald's tradition of close corporate reporting. And regional economies: above all Guangdong and the Greater Bay Area, whose output the site reports as home territory. Guangdong's scale gives that regional brief national weight — the Greater Bay Area of nine Guangdong cities plus Hong Kong and Macao produces roughly a tenth or more of China's GDP on a fraction of its land, and Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong top its rankings. A finance site in Guangzhou covers that economy from inside it.

Guangzhou: a finance newsroom in the trading capital

Location shapes the site's journalism. Guangzhou has been China's southern trading gateway for centuries, host of the Canton Fair, a manufacturing and logistics hub, and one of the three great mainland cities of the Greater Bay Area alongside Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Its media landscape, led by the Nanfang groups, developed a more commercial, market-facing style than the party-organ press of the north, and the Herald was a flagship of that style. 21jingji's reporting carries the perspective: business news written from the city where much of China's private trade and manufacturing wealth was first made, for readers across the country who need to understand markets, companies and regional development as working realities rather than abstractions.

The 2014 extortion scandal

The Herald's history includes a crisis that reshaped it. In September 2014, executives from the 21st Century Business Herald were arrested by Shanghai police, who said they were suspected of extortion; Chinese officials said the paper's website, 21cbh.com, also had irregularities such as not separating editorial and business operations. In April 2015, the official website was ordered by China's media regulator to cease operation because of news blackmail, the publishing licence of Moneyweek was revoked, and the newspaper was ordered to rectify. In December 2015, Shen Hao, the publisher who had founded the Herald in 2001, was sentenced to four years in prison for extortion. The case became one of the most prominent examples in Chinese media of the corruption risks in a system where business coverage and commercial pressure meet. Any honest profile of 21jingji must record it: the site that readers use today is the digital service of a newspaper that survived the fall of its own founder and a regulator-ordered shutdown of its earlier website, and was then rebuilt inside the Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group from 2016.

Data, video and the digital product range

The recorded description of 21jingji notes that alongside the newspaper's reporting, the site carries data and video products. That combination defines the modern form of a Chinese finance portal: rolling news for the trading day, data services for professional readers, and video for the mobile audience that now dominates Chinese news consumption. The Herald's print edition continues five days a week, but the centre of gravity of a business title sits online, where markets move continuously and readers expect the news with the numbers attached. 21jingji is the group's answer for its flagship title — the same newsroom's reporting, published at market speed.

Readers and influence

21jingji is described in its candidate record as one of China's most influential professional finance news websites. Its natural readership is the professional one its parent paper built: investors and fund managers, company executives, bankers, officials in economic agencies, and the business press itself, which treats the Herald's reporting as a source. Influence of that kind rests on the beats the site covers — macroeconomic policy, capital markets, companies and regional economies are the subjects on which decisions are made — and on the Guangzhou newsroom's two decades of business reporting since 2001. In a media system where many finance sites aggregate, a site carrying the original reporting of a national business newspaper occupies a distinct position.

21jingji in China's financial media landscape

China's professional finance media are concentrated in a few groups and cities: Caixin in Beijing, the Shanghai securities press, and in Guangzhou the Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group, whose flagship the Herald is. 21jingji's place in that landscape is as the digital flagship of the southern school — market-facing, Greater Bay Area-based, and generalist across the finance beats rather than confined to a single exchange or sector. Its history, from a 2001 weekly launch through a family of sister titles, a nationally reported scandal and reconstruction inside a new omnimedia group, mirrors the history of China's commercial business press itself. That is the context in which its daily reporting should be read.

Why 21jingji matters

For its readers, 21jingji is a working tool: the place where the 21st Century Business Herald's macroeconomic, markets, company and regional reporting appears continuously, with data and video attached. For observers of Chinese media, it is something more — the surviving digital form of one of the titles that defined China's market-era business journalism, carrying both its reputation and its record, including the 2014-15 scandal, into the omnimedia age. A Guangzhou finance site with a national readership and a complicated, fully documented past: that is what 21jingji is.