About Longyan Television

Longyan Television

Overview

Longyan Television is the prefecture-level television station of Longyan in western Fujian, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now integrated into the Longyan converged media centre. Its flagship channel carries local news and Hakka-culture programming in Mandarin and Hakka. Longyan is a core Hakka heartland in the mountains of western Fujian, and its television station is one of the few in China that broadcasts for a Hakka audience in its own ancestral territory, in both the national language and the Hakka tongue.

The station's service area holds two subjects of national significance. The first is the tulou, the great rammed-earth buildings of the Hakka and Minnan peoples, whose Fujian clusters were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008. The second is the Gutian Conference site, where a landmark meeting of the Chinese Red Army was held in December 1929. Hakka heritage and revolutionary history, earth buildings and red memory, give Longyan Television a cultural brief matched by few prefecture broadcasters.

The Hakka Heartland of Western Fujian

Longyan occupies the mountains of western Fujian, bordering Guangdong and Jiangxi, in the upper valleys of rivers flowing toward the coast. More than three quarters of its population is Hakka, and the region is described as a Hakka ancestral land: Changting, the historic seat of Tingzhou prefecture, is known as a Hakka capital, a staging point in the great southward migrations by which the Hakka, guest families who left northern China in successive waves of war and disorder, settled the southern mountains. Their language, architecture, food and clan traditions define the prefecture's culture.

For Longyan Television, this demography is destiny. Broadcasting in Hakka as well as Mandarin is a recognition that many viewers, especially older people in the mountain counties, live their home lives in Hakka. News may be national in language, but cultural programming in Hakka reaches audiences in the tongue of their grandmothers' songs and their clan halls. The station thus serves as a bridge between a Mandarin-speaking modern China and a Hakka-speaking local world, a role few media can perform as naturally as a prefecture broadcaster rooted in the community.

Organisation and the Converged Media Centre

Longyan Television now works within the Longyan converged media centre, the integrated local media body created by China's national programme of media convergence. Television, radio and official new-media services were combined into a single centre that gathers news once and distributes it across broadcast and digital platforms. The flagship channel, with its local news and Hakka-culture programming, remains the centre's best-known service.

The converged structure helps a mountain prefecture station sustain its specialisms. Hakka-language production, heritage features on the tulou, and red-history programming from Gutian all require specialist staff and local knowledge; pooling the city's media resources makes such coverage viable and allows it to travel, a television feature becoming online video that Hakka descendants overseas can watch. That diaspora audience is a real consideration in Longyan, whose Hakka emigrants are spread across the world and retain strong ties to their ancestral counties.

Local News in the Mountain Prefecture

News remains the foundation of the schedule. Longyan Television reports the municipal government, county administrations, infrastructure, education, health and public services across a prefecture of mountain counties including Shanghang, Yongding, Changting, Wuping, Liancheng and Xinluo. Development news follows the effort to connect western Fujian more closely to the coast: railways and expressways through the mountains, industrial development in the city, and the growth of tourism around the tulou and the Guanzhai Mountain scenery of Liancheng.

Livelihood programming serves the practical needs of this audience: agricultural prices and support for the prefecture's farm products, employment, schooling and health information, and community news from county towns and villages. In Hakka country, village news often means clan and ancestral-hall news, temple festivals and the gatherings of returned migrants, and the station's local reporting reflects that social fabric. The bulletin that results is both a government gazette and a community noticeboard, which is what prefecture television is expected to be.

The Tulou: Earth Buildings of World Heritage

The tulou are Longyan's gift to world architecture, and they are central to the station's cultural output. These large fortified earthen buildings, round, square and in many other forms, were built by Hakka and neighbouring communities from the Song and Yuan dynasties onward, maturing in the Ming and Qing, as communal homes for whole clans, with thick rammed-earth walls, a single defensible entrance and inward-facing homes around a courtyard. Yongding district alone counts its tulou in the tens of thousands, including the great Chengqi Building, known as a king of tulou, and the Zhencheng Building, their prince.

In July 2008 Fujian Tulou was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List, with Yongding's clusters at the heart of the listing, and the station's programming has followed the tulou's transformation from working clan homes to global attractions. Features explore how families still live in the buildings, how tourism income is shared, and how the earthen structures are maintained against rain and time. For Hakka viewers, such programmes are portraits of home; for everyone else, they are an introduction to one of the world's most extraordinary vernacular architectures, presented by the people who know it best.

Gutian and the Red History of Western Fujian

Western Fujian was one of the cradles of the Chinese revolution, and Longyan Television's history programming is anchored at Gutian, in Shanghang county. There, from 28 to 29 December 1929, the Ninth Party Congress of the Fourth Red Army, the Gutian Conference, adopted resolutions drafted under Mao Zedong that set foundational principles for the building of the Party and the Red Army. The conference site, a former clan ancestral hall and school at Gutian, is preserved as a national patriotic education base and a major red-tourism destination, visited again by national leadership for an all-army political work conference in 2014.

The station covers Gutian as living local history: commemorations, visitor seasons, the memorial hall and the red-tourism economy that supports the town. More broadly, its features trace the prefecture's revolutionary landscape, the Central Soviet counties, the Long March departures from Changting and Ninghua's neighbouring region, and the families whose histories are bound up with those years. In Longyan the red past is not an abstraction but a matter of local ancestors, and the station treats it with that intimacy.

Hakka Culture on Screen

Hakka-culture programming is the station's signature strand. It encompasses the Hakka language itself, mountain songs, folk customs, festivals, clan genealogies and ancestral halls, traditional foods such as Hakka stuffed tofu and the dried specialities of western Fujian, and the crafts and performances of the mountain counties. Programmes record elders singing, villages celebrating, and cooks and craftspeople practising skills passed down through generations of guest-family settlement in the southern mountains.

This work has an archival importance beyond entertainment. Hakka culture was formed by migration, and its traditions are strongest in exactly the kind of mountain communities whose young people now leave for coastal cities. By filming those traditions in place, in Hakka, Longyan Television creates a record that descendants, including the large Hakka diaspora in Taiwan, Southeast Asia and beyond, can use to remember where they come from. A prefecture station rarely gets to serve a worldwide people; Longyan Television, through its Hakka remit, does.

Economy, Mountains and Development

The station's economic reporting follows a prefecture working to convert mountain resources into modern livelihoods. Longyan has mining and machinery industries, tobacco and agricultural processing, and a growing tourism sector built on the tulou, Guanzhai Mountain and red history. News coverage tracks industrial investment, transport projects linking the prefecture to Xiamen and the coast, and the policies supporting mountain counties whose terrain once isolated them.

Agriculture and rural revitalisation form the other half of the economic story. Programmes cover the prefecture's farm products, forest industries and village development, and the return of migrants bringing skills and capital home. Environmental reporting accompanies development in a region of forested watersheds, where mining and construction must be balanced against the rivers that flow down to coastal Fujian. The station presents these questions as its audience experiences them: as choices about jobs, villages and landscape in a homeland the Hakka have farmed for centuries.

Longyan Television Today

Today Longyan Television broadcasts from the Longyan converged media centre, its flagship channel carrying local news and Hakka-culture programming in Mandarin and Hakka across western Fujian. Its defining subjects are those of the prefecture itself: the rammed-earth tulou of Yongding and Nanjing's neighbouring clusters, the Gutian Conference site in Shanghang, the ancestral towns of Tingzhou, and the daily life of a Hakka mountain population connected to a worldwide diaspora.

In most Chinese prefectures, television is a service; in Longyan it is also a vessel of identity. By broadcasting in Hakka, filming the tulou from inside the families who built them, and treating Gutian's history as local memory, the station does work that no national broadcaster could do in its place. That is the deepest justification for prefecture-level television, and Longyan Television embodies it as clearly as any station in the country.