About Beijing Review

Beijing Review

Overview

Beijing Review is China's only national news magazine in English, published weekly in Beijing by the China International Publishing Group, the state-run group responsible for much of China's foreign-language publishing. Its Chinese title, Beijing Zhoubao, literally means "Beijing Weekly," and for its first two decades the magazine was known in English as Peking Review. Founded in March 1958, it was created to give the People's Republic of China a timely English-language voice with which to communicate its position to the rest of the world, reporting and commenting on China's social, political, economic and cultural affairs and on policy developments. The magazine's official website is www.bjreview.com, and in addition to the English print edition it publishes online editions in Chinese, French, German and Japanese. It maintains two overseas operations: a North America Bureau in New York and the CHINAFRICA Media and Publishing company in Johannesburg, South Africa, which produces its ChinAfrica magazine. In 2006 the magazine claimed a per-issue circulation of 70,000, distributed throughout China and in 150 countries and regions worldwide.

The Idea: Zhou Enlai and the Geneva Conference

The magazine's origin lies in China's expanding diplomacy of the 1950s. Following China's participation in the 1954 Geneva Conference, Premier Zhou Enlai, travelling back with the Chinese delegation, suggested establishing an English-language weekly: the country's growing international engagement had made its main foreign publicity publication, the biweekly People's China, seem inadequate and untimely for the purpose. The proposal worked its way through the system over the following years. Wu Wentao, who had served as People's Daily's chief correspondent in Geneva during the conference, returned to China the following year and began preparations for such a weekly. In late 1957, as deputy head of the Foreign Languages Press, Wu formally submitted the proposal to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On 18 November 1957, Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Wentian convened discussions and submitted a report for the Premier's approval; Foreign Minister Chen Yi endorsed the proposal on 20 November 1957. In early 1958 Zhou approved the launch and instructed the Foreign Ministry to provide support, and his final authorisation on 9 February 1958 set 1 March 1958 as the publication date. The publisher's own history records the launch the same way: the first English edition appeared in March 1958, China's first national-level political news magazine in a foreign language since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, published weekly on Mondays to readers around the world, with the calligraphy for its Chinese title penned by the writer Guo Moruo.

The Peking Review Years

The magazine began life as Peking Review, using the then-standard postal romanisation of the capital's name. It replaced the English edition of People's China, whose editorial team it largely inherited, and it served as an important channel for the Chinese government to communicate with the rest of the world. The first issue carried an editor's note explaining that the magazine was meant to "provide timely, accurate, first-hand information on economic, political and cultural developments in China, and her relations with the rest of the world." Its early readers abroad were a mixture of sympathisers, journalists, academics and officials who, after the expulsion of most Western correspondents, had few other sources of information about China, and scholarly studies of Beijing's English-language magazines describe publications of this group as presenting the face of the new China to that audience. Distribution was not always smooth: the United States Postal Service initially restricted the magazine's distribution in the United States, a policy the U.S. Supreme Court overturned in its 1965 decision in Lamont v. Postmaster General. A front page of the magazine from 13 October 1959 survives as a representative artefact of the era, and complete runs of the early magazine are held and traded as historical records of the period.

Foreign-Language Editions

Although the English edition was always the flagship, Peking Review was a multilingual operation for much of its history. In 1963 it launched Spanish, French, Japanese and German editions. An Indonesian edition followed in the mid-1960s, and Arabic and Portuguese editions were added in the late 1970s. That spread of languages matched the geography of China's Cold War diplomacy, which sought audiences across Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe as well as the English-speaking world. The pattern changed at the end of the century: with the exception of the English edition, all of the foreign-language print editions ceased publication in 2000 and continued online instead. Today the magazine's print identity is English, while its website operation publishes online editions in Chinese, French, German and Japanese alongside English, and its listed languages have also included Spanish. The trajectory — many print languages in the era of print diplomacy, consolidation around English in print with the rest moving online — mirrors the wider economics of state foreign-language publishing.

The Cultural Revolution and Its Disruptions

From 1967 onward, Peking Review was significantly disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. In 1967, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai criticised the magazine and other external publicity outlets for overly heavy-handed messaging influenced by Cultural Revolution rhetoric, urging restraint and humility in communication directed at international audiences. In 1969, most of the magazine's staff were sent to participate in labour and political re-education at the May Seventh Cadre Schools, the rural institutions to which officials and intellectuals were dispatched during the period. The magazine nevertheless continued to appear through the decade, and it remained a vehicle through which Maoist China's positions reached foreign readers, including the anti-imperialist networks that distributed Chinese publications in the West. One human episode from the period has been documented in detail: Jack Chen, an editor of the magazine and son of the former foreign minister Eugene Chen, left China with his family for the United States in 1971 with Zhou Enlai's arrangement, officially to conduct external publicity work, and later advised U.S. President Richard Nixon ahead of his 1972 visit to China. In 1973, the magazine's deputy editor-in-chief Wang Xi visited the United States as part of a Chinese news delegation received by Nixon, and then Canada, where the delegation met Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

Reform, Renaming and the 1980s

In 1979 the magazine underwent major editorial and design reforms. While continuing to publish official documents and policy-related articles, it expanded its original reporting, special features and regular columns aimed at overseas readers — a shift towards a more readable magazine and away from a bulletin of documents. In the same reform moment, the English title was changed from Peking Review to Beijing Review, in line with the Chinese government's adoption of pinyin as the standard romanisation, the change that also turned Peking into Beijing in official English usage around the world. In 1980 a delegation from Time magazine led by Henry Grunwald visited the publication, a sign of the new contacts opening between Chinese and American journalism in the reform era. The decade ended with a harder episode: during the Tiananmen protests of 1989, Beijing Review initially expressed sympathy for the student protesters. The magazine was subsequently placed under the temporary supervision of Lin Wusun, head of the China International Publishing Group, and its coverage returned to the party line over the following year.

Content and Editorial Mission

Beijing Review's remit, as set out at its founding and maintained since, is to report and comment on China's social, political, economic and cultural affairs and on policy developments for readers outside China. As the country's only national news magazine in English, it occupies a position with no exact domestic parallel: it is simultaneously a newsweekly and an instrument of official communication, carrying the government's positions in a magazine format adapted to foreign reading habits. Its weekly cycle is built around the major developments in Chinese politics and the economy, supplemented by features and columns of the kind introduced in the 1979 reforms. For foreign researchers, diplomats and journalists, it has long served as a convenient English-language record of how Beijing wishes events in China to be understood — valuable both for what it reports and for the framing it chooses. Its press releases in international distribution describe its coverage as spanning politics and government, business, technology, religion, sports and entertainment, science and nature, and health and lifestyle.

Publisher and Overseas Operations

The magazine is published by the China International Publishing Group, now also known as the China International Communications Group, the state group whose history runs back to the international press bureau established in October 1949, at the very founding of the People's Republic. The group is the institutional home of China's foreign-language books and periodicals, and Beijing Review is among its flagship titles. The magazine's overseas footprint is unusually concrete for a periodical: it has a North America Bureau in New York, and in South Africa it operates through CHINAFRICA Media and Publishing (Pty) Ltd in Johannesburg, the company behind ChinAfrica magazine, which applies the Beijing Review model to China-Africa relations. The magazine's copyright lines appear across the ChinAfrica operation's publications, reflecting the shared institutional base in Beijing. This structure — a Beijing newsroom, a New York bureau and an African publishing company — reflects the magazine's continuing role as infrastructure for China's communication with the outside world rather than as a purely commercial newsweekly.

Circulation, Distribution and Digital Editions

Beijing Review's own introduction, published in 2006, claimed a per-issue circulation of 70,000 and distribution "throughout China and 150 countries and regions worldwide." Those are the magazine's own figures, from its own promotional material, and they are best read as a statement of the reach the title was built to achieve: a relatively modest print run aimed at an influential, geographically dispersed readership of officials, academics, journalists and libraries rather than a mass domestic audience. Digital editions have extended that reach; the magazine is sold internationally in digital form by magazine subscription services, which list weekly digital issues of more than twenty articles apiece, and its website at bjreview.com publishes continuously in several languages. The combination of a small, targeted print circulation and a free multilingual web presence is typical of state external-publicity publishing in the internet era, where influence is measured less in copies sold than in the availability of an authoritative English-language Chinese account of any given event.

Foreign Mission Designation and International Standing

In October 2020, the United States Department of State designated Beijing Review as a "foreign mission" of China, a classification the U.S. applies to entities it considers substantially owned or effectively controlled by a foreign government. The designation placed the magazine, for American regulatory purposes, in the same category as Chinese state media organisations, and it is a matter-of-fact indicator of how the publication is seen abroad: not as an independent newsweekly, but as an outlet of the Chinese party-state. The magazine has attracted that dual reading throughout its life — scrutinised as propaganda by critics, used as a source by scholars, and cited by historians of the Cold War as one of the principal channels through which Maoist and post-Mao China addressed the world. Studies of Chinese publications for foreign consumption in the 1960s treat Peking Review as a key vehicle for presenting China as a leader of the global anti-imperialist movement after the Sino-Soviet split, when China was isolated from both the socialist bloc and the West and print diplomacy carried unusual weight.

Legacy

Few magazines can claim to have been founded by a decision of a head of government, authorised down to its launch date, and Beijing Review's pedigree — proposed by Zhou Enlai after Geneva, prepared by Wu Wentao, approved through the Foreign Ministry in the winter of 1957–58 — makes it a unusually well-documented artefact of how the People's Republic built its external voice. Across the Peking Review decades, the language editions of the 1960s, the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution, the pinyin renaming and editorial reforms of 1979, the disciplining of 1989 and the digital consolidation after 2000, the magazine's core assignment never changed: to provide the world with a timely, official, English-language account of China. Published weekly from Beijing by the China International Publishing Group, with a New York bureau, a South African publishing arm and readers, by its own account, in 150 countries and regions, Beijing Review remains the title its first editor's note promised in March 1958 — China's national news magazine for the rest of the world.