About Ezhou Daily

Ezhou Daily

Ezhou Daily (Chinese: 鄂州日报, pinyin: Ezhou Ribao) is the Chinese-language daily newspaper of Ezhou, a prefecture-level city on the south bank of the Yangtze River in eastern Hubei Province, China. It is the print daily of Ezhou's municipal party-media system, listed in reference works on the city as the newspaper of the Ezhou Media Convergence Center (鄂州市融媒体中心), the converged organisation that brings the city's party newspaper together with Ezhou Radio and Television Station. In that role the paper serves as an official channel for municipal information — party and government announcements, policy explanation and local reporting — for a city of just over one million people that has been transformed in recent years by the opening of Asia's first dedicated cargo airport. This profile sets out what is verifiably known about the newspaper, the media system it belongs to, and the city whose public life it records. Where the public record about the paper itself is thin, that limit is stated plainly rather than filled in: no founding date, circulation figure or staff list for Ezhou Daily is reliably attested in the sources available for this profile, and none is invented here.

Identity and place in Ezhou's media system

Ezhou Daily is, by name and by function, the daily newspaper of Ezhou city. Chinese Wikipedia's template for Ezhou lists Ezhou Daily as the newspaper produced within the Ezhou Media Convergence Center, alongside Ezhou Radio and Television Station as the city's broadcast arm. That placement matters for understanding what kind of newspaper it is. Across China, prefecture-level cities maintain party newspapers that act as the official voice of the municipal party committee and government, and in the last decade those papers have been folded, city by city, into converged media centres that combine print, radio, television, websites and social-media accounts under one management and one newsroom workflow. Ezhou Daily sits inside that structure: it is not an independent commercial title competing for readers in an open market, but the print component of a single municipal media organisation whose other components include broadcasting and the online portal Ezhou News Net, which is profiled separately in this directory as part of the online news pool. Readers who encounter Ezhou Daily should therefore read it as the authoritative municipal record — the place where Ezhou's government publishes what it wants formally on the record — rather than as an adversarial watchdog, a role that belongs to a different tradition of journalism than the one in which Chinese municipal party papers operate.

The city the paper serves

To understand Ezhou Daily's beat, it helps to understand Ezhou itself. The city lies on the southern bank of the middle Yangtze, east of Wuhan's Wuchang districts and across the river from Huanggang, to which it is connected by the Ehuang Bridge. It sits between the larger cities of Wuhan and Huangshi and covers a relatively small territory — about 1,504 square kilometres in one official reckoning, 1,596 square kilometres in the municipal government's own English overview — dotted with more than 133 lakes and pools, including Liangzi Lake and Yanglan Lake. Administratively, Ezhou has three districts: Echeng District, the central urban area and municipal seat; Huarong District; and Liangzihu District, named for Liangzi Lake. Two functional areas sit alongside them, the Gedian Economic and Technological Development Zone and the Airport Economic Zone. According to the Seventh National Population Census, Ezhou's resident population was 1,079,353, of whom 695,697 lived in Echeng District — making Ezhou one of the smaller prefecture-level cities in Hubei, and one of only a handful in the province whose population grew between censuses, according to the municipal government. It is a compact, lake-filled, river-port city — Ezhou has six ports on the Yangtze, one able to handle 10,000-tonne vessels — whose important industries have historically included metallurgy, construction materials, textiles, chemicals and machinery.

A long history behind a small city

Ezhou's name carries unusual weight in Chinese history, and that history forms part of the cultural material a municipal newspaper in Ezhou routinely draws on. The lands around modern Ezhou were the territory of the State of E in the Zhou period, from which the modern name derives. In 221 AD the warlord Sun Quan, founder of the kingdom of Wu in the Three Kingdoms period, moved his capital here and renamed the city Wuchang, meaning prosperity through military virtue; in 229 he proclaimed himself emperor there, making the city the capital of Eastern Wu. The name Ezhou itself, applied to the area in the Sui dynasty period, is the source of Hubei Province's one-character abbreviation, E (鄂) — a point the municipal government itself makes when it calls Ezhou the root of Hubei and the source of Wuchang. The present prefecture-level city was formally established in 1983. Throughout its history the city has remained, in the words of its reference summaries, an important place politically, economically and militarily because of its strategic position along the middle Yangtze. For a local daily, that inheritance supplies a steady stream of heritage coverage — historic sites such as West Hill (Xishan) in the city centre and Lotus Hill, folk culture, and the city's claim to deep roots — alongside the harder news of development and administration.

Publisher of the official record: the census bulletins

The clearest documented example of Ezhou Daily performing its core official function is its role in publishing Ezhou's Seventh National Population Census results. Ezhou's Census Bulletin No. 2, setting out regional population figures for the city, was published by Ezhou Daily on 8 June 2021 and is cited to the newspaper in reference lists. National censuses are among the most consequential statistical exercises a Chinese city undertakes: their bulletins fix the official population of each district, shape planning and public-service provision, and become the baseline figures quoted for a decade. That the Ezhou bulletin appeared in Ezhou Daily, and is referenced to it, illustrates the paper's constitutional role in the local information order. When Ezhou's government needs a figure, a policy or a decision to be formally public — placed where citizens, researchers and other media can cite it — the municipal daily is one of the instruments it uses. Researchers using Ezhou Daily as a source should treat it accordingly: it is a primary source for what the Ezhou authorities announced, decided and claimed at a given date, and its census and bulletin material in particular carries official weight precisely because the paper is part of the municipal party-media system rather than separate from it.

Reporting the airport city

If one story has dominated Ezhou's recent development, it is the airport — and it is therefore inevitably a central subject for Ezhou Daily. Ezhou Huahu Airport, built in partnership with logistics company SF Express, officially opened on 17 July 2022. It is described by the municipal government and by national coverage as Asia's first and the world's fourth professional cargo hub airport, designed to put five major city clusters within a 1.5-hour flight radius, covering a large share of China's economy and population. The airport has repositioned a small steel-and-lakes city as a national air-logistics hub, with an Airport Economic Zone, an international communication effort built around it, and ambitions the city itself frames in terms of hundreds of thousands of jobs and a shift from a 'steel city' to a 'port city'. Ezhou Daily's reporting is credited in regional coverage of that transformation — for example, a September 2024 report on the establishment of the Huahu International Airport Youth League Alliance at the cargo airport was credited to Ezhou Daily. That credit line is a small but telling piece of evidence: it shows the daily doing the routine, on-the-ground reporting of institutional life around the airport — the alliances, ceremonies, conferences and zone announcements through which a long-term development project becomes everyday news — and it shows other outlets treating Ezhou Daily as the originating source for such Ezhou stories, which is exactly how municipal dailies function in China's layered media system.

Media convergence and the Ezhou Media Convergence Center

Ezhou Daily's present organisational home, the Ezhou Media Convergence Center, reflects a national policy that reshaped local Chinese media from the mid-2010s onward. Under media convergence, separate municipal newspapers, radio stations and television stations were merged into single centres tasked with producing content once and distributing it across print, broadcast, web and mobile platforms, and with adding government-service and public-service functions to their news role. Ezhou's centre fits that pattern: reference listings place the daily newspaper and the radio and television station under the same converged organisation, and the city's government reporting describes municipal media facilities such as the Ezhou press conference hall located in the Municipal Media Convergence Center's studio spaces, used for provincial-level briefings hosted in Ezhou. For the newspaper, convergence means its journalism no longer lives only on paper: stories gathered for the daily feed, and are fed by, the centre's broadcast and digital output, including Ezhou News Net online. It also means the paper's identity is increasingly institutional rather than standalone — bylines and credits increasingly belong to the centre as a whole. Profiles of Chinese municipal media need to record that shift honestly, because it changes what 'the newspaper' is: less a separate company with its own public profile, more the print desk of a unified city media organ.

International communication and OpenEzhou

The airport has also pulled Ezhou's media system into outward-facing work that a city of its size would not previously have attempted, and the municipal media — including the system Ezhou Daily belongs to — is the vehicle for it. On 29 May, in a ceremony reported by the municipal government in July 2024, the Ezhou International Communication Center and the Press Room of the Ezhou Airport-based Economic Zone were officially unveiled. The centre was described as the first international communication project with Hubei characteristics explored in China in the new era, established by the municipal party committee's publicity department relying on Hubei Radio and Television Station and Hubei Daily Media Group, and cooperating with Xinhua News Agency to use Xinhua's network of 183 overseas branches. Its overseas account, OpenEzhou, joined Facebook, Twitter and YouTube at the same time, and the centre announced a large-scale all-media interview programme, 'Crane Dance in Africa', taking Huahu Airport as a link point for stories about Hubei and Ezhou entrepreneurs in Africa. The press room, housed in the Ezhou International Convention and Exhibition Center, was built as a media integration platform linking central, provincial, municipal and district levels, with a shared live broadcast room for visiting media. None of this is Ezhou Daily acting alone — but it is the same municipal media ecosystem, and it shows the direction of travel for the paper's parent system: from serving a local readership in Chinese toward also projecting the airport city's image internationally.

How Ezhou Daily relates to Ezhou News Net

Researchers navigating Ezhou's media should distinguish the two titles this directory profiles for the city. Ezhou Daily is the print daily — the newspaper of the convergence centre, publisher of record for official bulletins. Ezhou News Net is the system's online portal, the web face of the same municipal party-media organisation. They are not competitors and not separate companies; they are the print and digital expressions of one converged operation, sharing a newsroom system, a political role and, in practice, much of their material, with the online portal able to update continuously and carry multimedia that the printed daily cannot. That relationship is typical of Chinese prefecture-level media after convergence, and keeping the two profiles separate in a directory — as this rollout does — is a matter of format and history rather than of separate ownership: the daily has the older, print identity and the official-bulletin function, while the portal is where most readers, especially younger and out-of-city readers, will actually encounter the centre's journalism day to day.

What Ezhou Daily covers, day to day

Within the limits of what can be verified, the daily's coverage can be characterised by its documented functions rather than by invented detail. It publishes official municipal information, as the census bulletin shows. It reports the institutional and development life of the city, as the Huahu Airport Youth League Alliance credit shows — and the airport economy, the Gedian development zone's integration with Wuhan's Optics Valley corridor, lake and Yangtze ecology, and the Wuhan metropolitan circle's coordinated development are the standing development themes of Ezhou's public agenda, all heavily covered by the municipal media system of which the paper is part. It carries the cultural and historical material of a city that markets itself as a city of a hundred lakes with a Three Kingdoms past. And as part of the convergence centre it participates in all-media coverage of major set-piece events in the city — provincial press conferences, visiting central and provincial media delegations, and airport milestones — where the centre provides live graphic-and-text broadcasting alongside the print report. What cannot responsibly be claimed here is equally important: this profile found no reliable public source for the paper's founding year, its circulation, its page count or format, its editor-in-chief, or a standalone official website for the print title — its website field in this rollout's records is accordingly blank — and any directory entry that supplied those details without a source would be inventing them.

Significance and how to use this source

Ezhou Daily matters beyond its modest city for three reasons. First, it is a clean example of the post-convergence Chinese municipal daily: a party newspaper absorbed into a unified media centre, still performing the old official-record function — census bulletins, government announcements — while its journalism flows across print, broadcast and web. Second, it is a primary source for one of China's most striking recent urban transformations, the attempt to turn a small Yangtze lakes city into Asia's cargo-aviation hub after Huahu Airport's opening on 17 July 2022; anyone studying that experiment will find the municipal daily and its sister outlets among the earliest and most detailed recorders of its everyday progress, to be read with the usual care due to an official source reporting on its own government's flagship project. Third, it illustrates the evidential reality of Chinese local media research: for hundreds of prefecture-level dailies, the verifiable public record consists of exactly the kind of traces documented here — a template listing, a census citation, a credit line in regional coverage — rather than the rich institutional histories available for national titles. Ezhou Daily is profiled on that honest basis: a real, functioning municipal daily, the print voice of Ezhou's converged party-media system, and the paper of record for a small city with an outsized airport and a very long history.