About The Beijing News

The Beijing News

The Beijing News, known in Chinese as Xin Jing Bao, literally "New Beijing News" or "New Capital News", is a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Beijing, China. It is published by The Beijing News Press and its official website is bjnews.com.cn, with a free online e-paper archive at epaper.bjnews.com.cn. The paper appears in tabloid format, described in reference listings as the Chinese "four-open" size. Although it is a newspaper about and for the capital city, its history is unusual: it was created not by a Beijing publisher alone, but as a joint venture between a central-level publisher based in Beijing and a famously commercial newspaper group based far to the south in Guangdong Province. That cross-regional origin made The Beijing News a landmark in modern Chinese newspaper history, and for its first decade it was widely regarded abroad as one of Beijing's most influential and professionally ambitious metropolitan dailies.

Founding as a Cross-Regional Joint Venture in 2003

The Beijing News began publishing on 11 November 2003. It was co-founded by Guangming Daily Press, publisher of Guangming Daily, and Nanfang Media Group, also rendered as the Southern Newspaper Group or Southern Daily Press Group, the Guangzhou-based publisher of Southern Weekly and Southern Metropolis Daily. Reference accounts describe it as the first Chinese newspaper co-founded by media groups from different regions, and the first to receive formal approval from the Chinese government to publish trans-regionally, at a time when trans-regional cooperation among print media was becoming a new trend in China. Both founding partners were owned within the Chinese Communist Party system, but at different levels: Guangming Daily Press was owned by the Central Committee of the party, while Nanfang Media Group was owned by the Guangdong provincial committee. The partnership therefore combined central-level standing in the capital with the money, commercial experience and editorial energy of the south.

Why the Two Founders Needed Each Other

Scholars of Chinese media have explained the logic of the unlikely partnership. Jonathan Hassid, in his study of China's journalists, noted that the two publishers had complementary difficulties. Guangming Daily had a valuable central-level administrative rank but was described as the country's poorest major publisher, while Nanfang had money to invest but its provincial administrative rank restricted it from obtaining a new publication number or expanding outside its home province of Guangdong. An account by the United States Congressional-Executive Commission on China added an editorial contrast: Guangming Daily consistently followed the Party's line, while the Southern Daily Press Group's publications tended to be more commercially oriented and more willing to test the censors. Initially, staff from Nanfang Media Group dominated the day-to-day operation of the new newspaper, and that southern influence helped turn The Beijing News quickly into one of Beijing's most influential newspapers, known for strong reporting and for what Chinese media scholars call supervision by public opinion.

The Founding Editors and the Sun Zhigang Legacy

The newspaper's first editorial team was headed by Cheng Yizhong, the editor who had published the Sun Zhigang scandal in March 2003 at Southern Metropolis Daily. The Sun Zhigang story, about a young migrant worker who died in custody, spread widely, helped create public pressure that led Beijing to abolish the decades-old detention and repatriation system, and made Cheng one of China's best-known editors. The first issue of The Beijing News carried that spirit on its front page, featuring a large photograph of former United States president Bill Clinton embracing an HIV-positive boy, a choice media historians read as both a sign and a cause of increased openness about HIV and AIDS in Chinese public discourse. Cheng was detained for five months in 2004 on embezzlement claims connected to his previous paper, released without formal charge in August 2004, dismissed from his job and expelled from the Communist Party, and was prevented from travelling abroad to receive the 2005 UNESCO Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize, which he had won for his dedication to journalistic professionalism.

Format, Scale and Place in the Beijing Market

The Beijing News was built as a thick, comprehensive metropolitan daily rather than a thin city tabloid. Its average print edition was cited at 88 pages, rising to 112 pages on Fridays. Reference lists of Beijing newspapers described it as the third best-selling daily in Beijing and characterised the newly launched paper as having reformist ambitions. Contemporary commentary on Beijing newspaper circulation warned that claimed figures for capital newspapers were often unreliable and disputed, and The Beijing News was no exception to that debate: its publishers claimed far higher sales than some industry sceptics credited. What was less disputed was its professional reputation. China Media Project, a research programme on Chinese media, has repeatedly described The Beijing News as long regarded as one of China's top professional newspapers and, in its early years, one of the country's leading commercial newspapers alongside the Beijing Times. Its reporting covered Beijing local news alongside national politics, society, economy, culture and public affairs, in the manner of a full-service city daily.

The 2005 Removal of Its Editors

The paper's assertive reporting brought it into repeated conflict with propaganda authorities. In the last week of December 2005, the editor-in-chief Yang Bin and his deputies Li Duoyi and Sun Xuedong were removed from their posts, in what Reporters Without Borders described as the publicity department seizing direct control of the paper on 28 December 2005. Staff and online readers protested the sackings, and accounts by the newspaper's journalists described colleagues spontaneously downing tools and walking out, while others tried to rescue copies of the paper they feared was ending. The 30 December issue went out without any editors named in the masthead. Reporting on the episode linked the purge to official anger over the paper's coverage, including reports in June 2005 about villagers in Hebei province who had lost their land and were killed in clashes, and its reporting on pollution in the Songhua River in November 2005. The management of Guangming Daily, which held 51 percent of the paper's shares, took charge of appointing new editors. The episode became a widely cited case study of the limits placed on commercially oriented journalism in China.

Reporting the Wenzhou Train Collision in 2011

In July 2011 The Beijing News was among the Chinese newspapers that pushed against official restrictions on reporting the Wenzhou high-speed train collision, in which two trains collided near Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, killing about 40 people. The Financial Times reported that the newspaper defied the ban on reporting the crash, although in the same month it also scrapped nine pages of special reporting under pressure. The Committee to Protect Journalists and Index on Censorship both recorded a subtler form of defiance: the paper's front page carried a story alleging that the Palace Museum in Beijing had tried to cover up the breaking of a valuable Song dynasty pottery piece into six pieces, a number that matched the six carriages that had gone off the rails in the crash. Commentators read the front page as an allusion to the censored disaster, an example of the indirect methods Chinese journalists used when direct reporting was forbidden. The episode reinforced the paper's reputation, at home and abroad, for testing the boundaries of permitted reporting.

Transfer to the Beijing Municipal Committee in 2011

On 1 September 2011 the newspaper was taken over by the Publicity Department, also translated as the Propaganda Department, of the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. China Media Project analysis explained the significance of the change: the paper had previously benefited from the administrative clout of its central-ranking Guangming Daily partner and the cross-regional protection of its Guangdong partner, which made it harder for Beijing city leaders to control its coverage of sensitive stories concerning their own interests. Under municipal management it was, in that analysis, knocked down a notch administratively. In 2013 it was reported that Dai Zigeng, a publisher of the newspaper, had verbally resigned because of political pressure from the propaganda authorities, amid a dispute over state meddling at the paper reported by the South China Morning Post. In 2014 the municipal Publicity Department acquired the remaining 49 percent stake from Nanfang Media Group, ending the founding cross-regional partnership; the South China Morning Post reported public fears that the paper would be turned into a propaganda mouthpiece. In February 2014 the paper published coverage concerning possible corruption involving the son of former security chief Zhou Yongkang, but the article was taken down from its website.

Merger with Beijing Morning Post and Qianlong in 2018

In 2018 a further restructuring was announced: The Beijing News, the Beijing Morning Post and the news website qianlong.com were to be merged and integrated. The Beijing Morning Post ceased publication in the same year. The merger reflected the wider contraction of Beijing's once crowded metropolitan newspaper market, in which the Beijing Times, another leading commercial daily, had already ceased publication in 2017. China Media Project reporting in 2018 also described a haemorrhaging of top management from The Beijing News, noting that the editor-in-chief position remained vacant for a period and that former Beijing Business Today editor-in-chief Li Hai was brought in as a deputy chief editor, in what was seen as an effort to address the loss of senior staff. Through these changes the masthead itself survived, and The Beijing News continued as the capital's best-known surviving metropolitan daily brand from the commercial newspaper era.

Digital Presence and the E-Paper

The newspaper's digital home is bjnews.com.cn, and its print pages are reproduced in a free online e-paper archive at epaper.bjnews.com.cn, allowing readers to read the daily edition page by page as printed. Like other major Chinese metropolitan newspapers, The Beijing News now publishes continuously online as well as in print, and its website serves as the primary record of its reporting. The paper should not be confused with unrelated English-language websites that use similar names, such as a "Daily Beijing News" site operated from outside China; the genuine newspaper is the Chinese-language Xin Jing Bao published in Beijing by The Beijing News Press. Its ownership today rests with the Chinese Communist Party through the Beijing municipal authorities that took it over in 2011, completing a journey from an experimental cross-regional joint venture to a municipally managed capital newspaper.

Significance in Modern Chinese Journalism

The Beijing News matters in Chinese media history for three connected reasons. First, its 2003 launch proved that a newspaper could be jointly created by publishers from different regions and different administrative ranks, a model that drew national attention as the first formally approved trans-regional newspaper venture. Second, its first decade made it a reference point in debates about professional journalism in China: its founding editor's role in the Sun Zhigang case, the 2005 protest over its sacked editors, and its coverage of the 2011 Wenzhou collision are standard examples in scholarship and press-freedom reporting on how far commercial Chinese newspapers could go. Third, its changes of ownership, from the Guangming-Nanfang partnership to full Beijing municipal control in 2011 and 2014, and its 2018 merger with the Beijing Morning Post and qianlong.com, chart in a single title the rise and consolidation of China's metropolitan newspaper era. For readers in the capital it remains simply Xin Jing Bao, a thick daily newspaper of Beijing record, but for students of Chinese media it is one of the most documented newspapers of its generation.