About Shenzhen News

Shenzhen News

Shenzhen News, published at sznews.com and known in Chinese as Shenzhen Xinwen Wang, is the online news arm of the Shenzhen Press Group in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. It is described in company reporting as the largest news network media under the Shenzhen Press Group and as a leader in new media within that group, with a publishing portfolio built around the group's party and commercial newspapers. The site provides news and information across sectors including real estate, transportation, economy, health, cuisine, travel, education and entertainment, serving the city that grew from a fishing area into China's best-known special economic zone and technology centre.

The Shenzhen Press Group behind the website

Shenzhen News cannot be understood apart from its parent. The Shenzhen Press Group is a state media company in Shenzhen overseen by the Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. It was established in September 2002 by merging the former Shenzhen Special Zone Press Group with Shenzhen Business Daily interests. The predecessor Shenzhen Special Zone Press Group had itself been established on 1 November 1999 on the basis of Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, the city's party organ. The 2002 merger created a single newspaper group for a city whose press had grown rapidly alongside its economy, and sznews.com became the group's shared online gateway.

The group's newspapers include Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, Shenzhen Evening News, Shenzhen Business Daily, also translated as Shenzhen Economic Daily, and Jingbao. The group also owns the Shenzhen Publishing House. According to the 2018 News and Publishing Industry Analysis Report released by the State Administration of Press and Publication, Shenzhen Press Group ranked seventh in the overall economic scale comprehensive evaluation of Chinese newspaper groups, a measure of the scale on which the website's parent operates.

Shenzhen Special Zone Daily and the print roots

The oldest and most authoritative title feeding the Shenzhen News ecosystem is Shenzhen Special Zone Daily. Launched on 24 May 1982, it is the official organ of the Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and is described as the first special zone newspaper in China. Its founding came less than two years after Shenzhen was designated a special economic zone, and its reporting has chronicled the city's transformation ever since. The newspaper is published by the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily Agency within the press group, and its digital edition is hosted within the sznews.com system at sztqb.sznews.com.

On 26 March 1992, Shenzhen Special Zone Daily first published a long-form report on Deng Xiaoping's southern tour, an episode that linked the newspaper to one of the defining moments in China's reform and opening-up story and in Shenzhen's own development. That history matters for Shenzhen News because the website inherits the authority and archive of a title that was present at, and reported, the policy turning points that made modern Shenzhen.

The group's other newspapers online

Shenzhen Economic Daily, abbreviated SED and also translated as Shenzhen Business Daily or Shenzhen Commercial Daily, is a large comprehensive daily newspaper with economic reporting as its main focus and the party newspaper directly under the Shenzhen Municipal Committee. It was launched on 8 January 1989 and is divided into sections covering news, economy, recreation and market coverage. Its economic focus fits a city built on trade, manufacturing, finance and technology, and its content appears online through the sznews.com domain at szsb.sznews.com.

Shenzhen Evening News, Shenzhen Wanbao in Chinese, is the group's evening title. It is owned by Shenzhen Press Group and has been reported as having around 490,000 papers in circulation daily. It is known for reporting on social and familial issues as well as the market, personal finance and politics. The newspaper was referenced by The New York Times and The Washington Post following the 2015 Shenzhen landslide, where The New York Times found that Shenzhen Evening News had foreseen the incident and written about it earlier in October that year. Its digital home is likewise within sznews.com, at the szwb section of the domain. Together with Jingbao, these titles give Shenzhen News a full daily news cycle in digital form: party organ, business daily and evening paper under one web address.

What Shenzhen News publishes

Shenzhen News itself is a Shenzhen-based digital media platform providing news and information across a wide range of sectors. Professional directory descriptions list its coverage as including real estate, transportation, economy, health, cuisine, travel, education and entertainment. That breadth reflects its role as a city portal rather than a single newspaper website: it aggregates and publishes the press group's journalism alongside service and lifestyle information for residents of a metropolitan technology and trading hub in the Pearl River Delta, immediately north of Hong Kong.

Company descriptions of Shenzhen News stress the resources behind that breadth. It is presented as having a variety of high-quality internet resources including online news, online media content distribution, online publication and online culture content management, and its audience outreach, influence and operation capacity are said to rank among the highest of key news websites in China. Those claims were made by the company and its partners in the context of its new-media business development, and they indicate how the press group positions sznews.com: not as a simple electronic edition of one paper, but as the group's principal network media business.

Market position in Shenzhen

The press group's dominance of its home market underpins the website. In 2015, Shenzhen News's partner China Information Technology, Inc. described Shenzhen Press Group as one of the largest and technologically most advanced party-affiliated newspaper media groups, and stated that newspapers and other publications of Shenzhen Press Group account for more than 90 percent of the print media market share in Shenzhen. While that figure comes from a commercial partner's announcement rather than an independent audit, it captures the structural position from which sznews.com operates: the online arm of a group whose titles collectively dominate local print readership in its city.

That position is unusual even among Chinese provincial press groups because Shenzhen itself is unusual. The city is a sub-provincial metropolis and special economic zone whose population and economy rival those of many provinces, and it is home to major technology and finance companies. A city-level press group ranking seventh nationally in economic scale, as Shenzhen Press Group did in the 2018 industry report, reflects that weight, and Shenzhen News is the digital front door to that operation.

The Internet Plus Smart City partnership

A documented episode in Shenzhen News's development as a new-media business came on 12 May 2015, when China Information Technology, Inc., known as CNIT, announced a five-year strategic agreement with Sznews.com Co., Ltd., described in the announcement as a subsidiary of Shenzhen Press Group Limited, to collaborate on an Internet Plus Smart City project involving industries such as healthcare, education and transportation. CNIT and Shenzhen News were initially to collaborate on a Healthy City project.

According to the agreement as announced, Shenzhen News would leverage the competitive strength of its parent company in media content and resources to operate the new media platform associated with the project. The announcement described Shenzhen News as a leader in new media under the Shenzhen Press Group with experience implementing new media projects. The partnership illustrates a wider pattern in Chinese official media in the 2010s, in which key news websites sought roles in smart-city services and local digital government projects, extending their function beyond news publishing into city information infrastructure.

Shenzhen News in the Greater Bay Area media landscape

Shenzhen News operates in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, one of China's most media-rich regions. International journalist delegations visiting Shenzhen are routinely taken to the Shenzhen News Group, as the press group is also styled in English, to see how the city's media presents its reform-and-opening story; a 2025 delegation visit, for example, included an exchange with representatives of the local English newspaper Shenzhen Daily and a presentation of the multilingual EyeShenzhen platform. That context places sznews.com within a city media system that speaks simultaneously to local Chinese readers, to the Greater Bay Area and to international audiences following Shenzhen's technology-driven growth.

Within that system, Shenzhen News remains the Chinese-language flagship portal. Its combination of the group's party newspaper authority, business reporting and evening-paper social coverage, delivered through a single domain with newspaper sub-sites, makes it the most complete online record of the Shenzhen Press Group's daily journalism and a primary source for news about Shenzhen itself.

Shenzhen News today

Today Shenzhen News continues at sznews.com as the online news arm of the Shenzhen Press Group, publishing the group's newspapers in digital form and providing city news and services across economy, transport, property, health, education, travel, food and entertainment. Its history is inseparable from Shenzhen's own: a press group formed in 2002 from the city's special-zone newspaper tradition, a flagship paper founded in 1982 at the start of the reform era, and a website that carried that combined operation into smart-city partnerships and Greater Bay Area international communication. For readers researching Shenzhen, sznews.com is both a news source and the digital archive of the city's dominant newspaper group.