About Duzhe

Duzhe

Overview

Duzhe, whose name means "Readers" or "The Readers" in Chinese, is a general-interest digest magazine published in Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in northwestern China, by the Gansu People's Press, also rendered in English as the Gansu People's Publishing House. It is widely described as the most widely circulated magazine in the People's Republic of China and, for long stretches of its history, the country's leading magazine by circulation. The magazine's official website is duzhe.com. Unlike China's best-known periodicals, which are mostly based in Beijing or Shanghai, Duzhe built a national and eventually international readership from a base deep in China's northwest, a fact that regular contributors have themselves described as something of a miracle. Its formula is the digest formula: a compact magazine of short, readable pieces drawn from many sources, sold at a low price and aimed at ordinary readers rather than specialists.

Founding in Lanzhou in 1981

Duzhe was first published in Lanzhou in March 1981 under the name Duzhe Wenzhai, literally "Reader's Digest." Reporting by Xinhua on the magazine's fortieth anniversary recalled that in the autumn of 1980, Cao Keji, editor-in-chief of the Gansu People's Publishing House, approached editor Hu Yaquan and asked him to run the new magazine. Hu brought in Zheng Yuanxu, and the two men made an unlikely founding pair for a literary digest: both had science backgrounds, Hu having graduated from Lanzhou University in geography and Zheng from the physics department of Tsinghua University. The early editorial department worked out of a small house of less than six square metres in Lanzhou. The title of the original magazine was inscribed by the noted calligrapher Zhao Puchu, and his calligraphy continued to be used after the later change of name.

The Name Change of 1993

For its first twelve years the magazine traded under the Duzhe Wenzhai name, which placed it in direct conflict with the American Reader's Digest. In 1993, because of that name conflict — described in Chinese sources as a trademark dispute with the United States publication — the magazine was renamed simply Duzhe. The change, dated to July 1993 in Chinese reference accounts, settled the title under which the magazine has been published ever since. The episode is a useful marker of how young China's commercial magazine market still was in the early reform years: a provincial digest could grow for more than a decade under a borrowed English-language concept before the naming question had to be resolved, and the resolution left it with a shorter, fully Chinese identity of its own.

Editorial Content and Digest Format

Duzhe is a comprehensive digest magazine. Its pages combine original articles with condensed articles reprinted from other newspapers, periodicals and books, together with book excerpts and collections of jokes, anecdotes, quotations and other short pieces. Chinese reference descriptions note that the articles it selects cover literature, art, commentary, stories and popular-science sketches connected with everyday life. The emphasis is on pieces that are short, complete in themselves and easy to pick up and put down, and over time its editorial practice shifted from publishing longer articles towards short, concise pieces with a strong idea or a reflective point. It is published twice a month, on a semi-monthly or fortnightly rhythm, a frequency that kept the title constantly present on newsstands and in subscribers' homes. That combination of brevity, variety and frequency is central to understanding the magazine: Duzhe did not ask readers for specialist knowledge, only for a few minutes at a time.

Early Growth in the 1980s

The magazine's start was not smooth. Xinhua's anniversary account records that after the Xinhua Bookstore had ordered its copies of the first issues, more than 10,000 copies were left over. The new, informative style of the digest soon won market recognition, however. By the end of 1981 its monthly circulation had reached about 90,000 copies, from an initial level reported at around 30,000. In 1984, three years into publication, its print run passed one million copies — one Chinese account puts the third-year figure at 1.36 million. In 1986 Duzhe became one of the ten magazines with the largest circulation in China. The growth took place against the background of the cultural opening that followed the Cultural Revolution: the magazine's early editors themselves described its first stage as introducing excellent Western culture, advanced ideas and scientific knowledge into the gap left by those years, which quickly aroused the interest of readers, especially young readers.

China's Leading Magazine in the 1990s

The 1990s were Duzhe's decade of dominance. Chinese reference accounts record that from 1991 to 1999 the magazine was consistently the leading magazine in China by circulation. Its circulation passed two million copies in 1991, three million in 1992 and four million in 1994, when it became the largest-circulation magazine in the country. A People's Daily report in August 2000 described Duzhe as one of China's most popular magazines, with an average monthly circulation that had reached 5.2 million copies, a growth of 60 percent compared with the previous year. The same report noted that the magazine had added two urban editions and one rural edition, aimed at some 80 percent of the country's population, and that it was planning to launch an electronic edition on the web the following year — an early sign that even China's most successful print digest was already looking beyond paper.

Fourth Best-Selling Magazine in the World

Duzhe's scale in the early 2000s placed it in global company. In 2003 it was among the top five magazines in China and was ranked the fourth best-selling magazine in the world, after Reader's Digest, National Geographic and Time. A People's Daily report of August 2003, announcing a North American publishing contract, stated that the magazine had been ranked in the top ten for circulation among Chinese magazines for thirteen consecutive years, that it held the highest circulation in the country, and that by April 2003 it had circulated 7.65 million copies and was ranked fourth among magazines worldwide. Later in the decade the figures rose further still: one widely cited reference account gives an average monthly circulation of 8.98 million in 2006, ranking first among Chinese journals, first among Asian journals and fourth among the world's comprehensive journals, while the media scholar Xiang Ren, writing in the Handbook of Magazine Studies, describes Duzhe as China's top bestselling consumer magazine title, with a record high of 10 million in 2006. Cumulative circulation since the magazine's founding has been reported at more than 500 million copies.

Editions, Spin-Offs and Overseas Publishing

The success of the flagship produced a family of related publications and editions. Reference accounts list spin-off journals including a local humanities edition, Duzhe Appreciation, a Duzhe original edition devoted to original writing, and an overseas edition, and note that the magazine has also appeared in Braille, minority-language and Traditional Chinese versions. The Reader Network, its online arm, was launched in 2007. The brand also travelled in print. In August 2003 the publisher, Gansu People's Press, signed a 4.5-million-US-dollar contract with the US-based Big Way Media Inc. in Lanzhou, under which the American company was entitled from 2004 to 2008 to publish 5,000 simplified-Chinese copies of each issue in the United States and Canada at a price of 2.5 US dollars per copy, with per-issue circulation there expected to reach 25,000 within five years and an English version expected to enter the North American market later. Reference summaries of the magazine's reach state that it has been marketed in more than 90 countries and regions.

Readers, Contributors and Cultural Standing

Duzhe's cultural standing in China goes beyond its sales figures. It has been called the "Chinese mind reader" and China's "spiritual reader," and has been compared both to Reader's Digest and to the New Yorker. In April 2023 an exhibition in Beijing presented illustrations published in the magazine over the decades. The noted author Liang Xiaosheng, a regular contributor, said at the opening that the magazine was born out of a wish to enrich the cultural life and spiritual world of young people in Lanzhou. The exhibition also documented the magazine's long relationships with its illustrators: Li Xiaolin, a professor of printmaking at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, said he had made nearly 2,000 paintings for Duzhe over 25 years after its editors spotted his work. The magazine's bond with ordinary readers was illustrated in March 2023 when Chen Tianzhu, its deputy editor-in-chief and a deputy to the 14th National People's Congress, told of a pen-pal relationship begun in 2010 with Xiaoyu, a junior high school student in poor health who was caring for her grandmother and younger brother, and of the books — including Lu Yao's Ordinary World and Shi Tiesheng's Temple of Earth and I — that she recommended to the girl over two years of letters.

The Publisher and the Stock Market Listing

Behind the magazine stands a publishing business that itself became a listed company. Duzhe Publishing and Media Co., Ltd., the magazine's publisher and the main asset of which was the Duzhe title, prepared a listing on the Shanghai Stock Exchange; an updated prospectus released in May 2015 said the company would raise 504 million yuan, about 81 million US dollars, to develop its magazine titles, digital publishing projects and book publishing operations, with China Dragon Securities, also based in Lanzhou, as lead underwriter, and the parent group retaining a controlling 80 percent stake. The prospectus also disclosed the pressures on the business: sales revenue had declined between 2012 and 2014, from 191 million yuan to 173 million yuan, and the magazine's cover price had risen at the start of that year from four yuan to six yuan. Company profiles describe the listed business, founded in 2009 and headquartered at 568 Reader Avenue in Lanzhou's Chengguan District, as a subsidiary of Reader Publishing Group, engaged in journal, book and electronic publishing, advertising and new media.

Duzhe in the Digital Era

Like every Chinese consumer magazine, Duzhe has had to live through the digital transition that reversed a decades-long growth trend in print: Chinese magazine advertising spending fell in 2012 for the first time, and subscriptions to leading titles fell for more than a decade. Within the publisher's own family, the print edition of Readers Original, one of the Duzhe spin-off titles, was among the Chinese magazines reported to have folded or announced the end of print in that period. The flagship brand, however, carried unusual weight into the social media era: in a Statista-based ranking of leading Chinese magazine brands on social media as of July 2021, based on following and sharing numbers, Duzhe placed first of all magazine brands in China. From a six-square-metre room in Lanzhou in 1981 to the top of China's circulation tables and a fourth-place world ranking, Duzhe remains the defining example of the Chinese digest magazine — proof that in the reform era a provincial publisher, a low price and a well-chosen short article could build one of the largest magazine readerships on earth.