About Beijing Channel

Beijing Channel

Beijing Channel is an English-language Substack newsletter written by Yang Liu, a journalist who discloses in his newsletter biography that he has been a journalist with Xinhua News Agency since 2011 and that the newsletter represents his personal opinion. According to an account in the Xinhua industry periodical China Journalist, Xinhua News Agency's International Department launched the Beijing Channel newsletter to meet demand for high-quality China-related content among influential figures, and it reported the newsletter had more than 4,000 subscribers. Commentators on China's state-media newsletter scene discuss Beijing Channel alongside Ginger River Review and Inside China as among the most accessible sources within the official media system for gauging policy direction. The newsletter is published from Beijing in English for an international readership.

Author Yang Liu and his disclosure

Beijing Channel's Substack biography is notable for its candour. In it, Yang Liu writes: "I'd like to disclose that I am a journalist with Xinhua News Agency since 2011." A few words later he adds: "To be clear, everything I say in this newsletter only represent my personal opinion, not that of Xinhua." That pairing — an open statement of state-media employment alongside a claim that the writing is personal — defines the newsletter's position and has made it a central example in debates about how to read newsletters written by Chinese state-media journalists. Yang has worked at Xinhua, China's official state news agency, since 2011, and writes Beijing Channel in English under his own name.

Launch by Xinhua's International Department

The institutional account of Beijing Channel's origins comes from China Journalist, a periodical aimed at state-media industry professionals. As reported in an analysis of Chinese state media on Substack, the China Journalist article stated: "Xinhua News Agency's International Department, capitalizing on the demand for high-quality China-related content among influential figures, launched the 'Beijing Channel' newsletter." The same article reported that Beijing Channel was followed by over 4,000 subscribers, and claimed its readers included diplomats stationed in China, foreign media reporters and scholars. That framing — a newsletter built to serve influential foreign readers — sits in tension with the author's personal-opinion disclaimer, and the tension between the two accounts is the most documented fact about the publication.

The wider state-media newsletter strategy

Beijing Channel did not appear in isolation. Industry writing inside China's state-media system, discussed in the same Substack analysis, explains why agencies such as Xinhua turned to newsletters. Du Jian, deputy director of the External Communication Office of Xinhua's International Department, wrote that Substack taps into a disillusionment with mass media and allows authors to speak directly to readers; that it allows the state to "bypass algorithms" and "effectively target information at specific audiences"; and that the aim is to establish a "benign mutual relationship" with a few key thought leaders, from where influence over readers' thinking can grow, in the analysis's paraphrase, "drop-by-drop," establishing "a correct understanding of China." Xinhua is one of many top-level Chinese state-media organizations that have attempted to grow audiences on Substack, with mixed success. Beijing Channel is one of the products of that strategy.

How commentators read Beijing Channel

Writers familiar with the cohort of newsletters run by Chinese state-media journalists describe Beijing Channel, like Inside China, as one of the more accessible and flexible sources within the official system for understanding where policy thinking is heading. A first-person account by a writer who helped found Ginger River Review — and who knows Yang Liu's Beijing Channel and Fred Gao's Inside China — argued that when these authors say their newsletters represent only their own voices and not those of Xinhua, they mean it literally: as far as the writer knew, their exact writings are not reviewed or approved by Xinhua, and internal regulations in fact do not allow them to represent Xinhua in their newsletters. The same account noted a practical sign of personal rather than institutional production: Beijing Channel's frequency of updating is rather erratic, and sometimes many months pass without a single issue — a pattern unlike a staffed official channel.

The critical reading

Other analysts read the same facts differently. An investigation of how Chinese state media target Western "elites" via Substack argued that state-media employees come to the platform in what it called camouflage: despite declaring their state affiliations, they are, in the author's view, not seen as sincere when they claim a newsletter represents only personal opinion, because documents from their employers suggest the operations are embedded in the system. That analysis took Beijing Channel as a key example precisely because of the contrast between Yang Liu's disclaimer and the China Journalist account crediting Xinhua's International Department with launching the newsletter for influential readers. The debate is not about whether Yang works for Xinhua — he discloses that himself — but about how much weight readers should give the personal-opinion framing when an employer's own industry press describes the newsletter as an institutional launch.

Readership and audience

The only subscriber figure publicly reported for Beijing Channel comes from the China Journalist account: more than 4,000 subscribers. The same account presented the readership as concentrated among influential figures — diplomats stationed in China, foreign correspondents and scholars — which matches the newsletter's design as an English-language channel explaining Beijing's perspective to foreign elites rather than a mass-audience product. The newsletter's small scale relative to its sister cohort is also documented: Jiang Jiang's Ginger River Review, the best-known title in the group, has been reported at around 13,000 subscribers, making Beijing Channel one of the smaller but still closely watched titles in the scene, read mainly by professional China watchers who track official-media signals.

Content and purpose

Beijing Channel publishes English-language commentary and explanation on China for foreign readers, presenting Chinese policy and perspectives in the author's own voice. Its stated purpose, in the institutional account, was to meet demand for high-quality China-related content among influential figures; in the author's account, it is a personal newsletter. Either way, its function for readers is similar: it offers a view from inside the official media system, written by a serving Xinhua journalist, in a more flexible and personal register than Xinhua's wire copy. Analysts of Chinese state media treat such newsletters as useful precisely because they can indicate how policy is being thought about and explained within the system, in language aimed at foreign diplomats, reporters and scholars.

Beijing Channel in its cohort

Beijing Channel is usually discussed as part of a recognizable cohort of Substack newsletters written by Chinese state-media journalists in English: Ginger River Review and Beijing Scroll by Jiang Jiang, Inside China by Fred Gao, and Beijing Channel by Yang Liu among them. The cohort attracted sustained attention in 2025, when analyses of the phenomenon appeared in English and when Jiang Jiang was invited to lecture at Tsinghua on how to tell China's story well through newsletters. Within that cohort, Beijing Channel stands out for the directness of its author's disclosure and for the documentary record — an employer-side launch account in China Journalist — that allows readers to compare the personal and institutional descriptions of the same publication. It is catalogued here as an online news outlet based in Beijing, China, published in English on Substack.

Status

Beijing Channel's publication rhythm has been described by a knowledgeable commentator as erratic, with gaps of many months between issues, and no regular schedule has been advertised. The newsletter remains part of the reference set that researchers, journalists and diplomats use when assessing how China's official media system communicates with foreign elites in the newsletter era. Its significance is out of proportion to its size: with a disclosed Xinhua author, a reported 4,000-plus subscribers among influential readers, and an unusually well-documented debate about what it represents, Beijing Channel is one of the clearest case studies of the personal newsletter as an instrument — and a puzzle — of Chinese external communication.