About Harper's Bazaar China

Harper's Bazaar China

Harper's Bazaar China was the Chinese edition of Harper's Bazaar, launched in Beijing in November 2001 through a partnership between the Trends Media Group and Hearst. It entered the market through a copyright cooperation with the existing magazine China Fashion: the title began as Best China Fashion, took on the Harper's Bazaar name under a copyright agreement in September 2002, and was fully rebranded as Harper's Bazaar in 2005. Su Mang, who served as its executive publisher and then editor-in-chief from its launch until 2018, built it into one of China's most powerful fashion titles and founded its Bazaar Stars' Charity Night, which grew from a small SARS-era auction in 2003 into the country's best-known celebrity fundraising gala. Aimed at successful women over twenty-five with high incomes and a love of fashion, the magazine stood with Elle China and Vogue China at the top of the Chinese glossy market.

An American Original Dating from 1867

The brand Harper's Bazaar China carried into Beijing was the oldest in fashion publishing. Harper's Bazaar was first published in New York City on 2 November 1867, originally as a weekly entitled Harper's Bazar, by Harper & Brothers, and it became a monthly at the start of the twentieth century. Hearst acquired the magazine in 1913 and owned it thereafter, describing the Chinese edition's parent as a title with, at the time of the 2002 agreement, 139 years of history. It was regarded as America's first fashion magazine and the world's oldest operating women's fashion magazine. That heritage was the commercial point of the Chinese venture: as with Elle and Vogue, a Chinese publisher gained an internationally recognised name, a supply of international content and instant credibility with luxury advertisers, while the American owner gained entry to a market that foreign publishers could not enter alone. The Chinese edition, however, was not a translation of the American one; from the start it was built as a Chinese magazine under a borrowed and carefully licensed name.

From China Fashion to Harper's Bazaar, 2001 to 2005

The Chinese edition's route to its name was gradual, and it explained much about how international titles entered China. In November 2001 Best China Fashion was launched, in cooperation with the Trends group — the magazine had previously been distributed in an English-language form as China Fashion's international version. In September 2002 the magazine began its copyright cooperation with Harper's Bazaar and took on the Bazaar name; China's publishing administration officially approved the joint copyright agreement between Harper's Bazaar and the Chinese fashion publishing group that year, although in practice publication under the arrangement was already under way. After about three years of copyright collaboration, the magazine changed its name fully to Harper's Bazaar in 2005. The staged rebranding was typical of the period: a local title with a valid Chinese periodical licence provided the legal shell, the foreign brand was introduced under licence once regulators were satisfied, and only then did the international masthead take over completely. By the time the renaming was complete, the magazine was competing directly with Elle China, the pioneer of 1988, for the advertising of the luxury brands then entering the Chinese market.

Trends Media Group and the Hearst Partnership

The publisher behind Harper's Bazaar China was the Trends Media Group, the company built around Trends Magazine — described as China's first fashion magazine — which grew into a powerhouse publisher of eighteen titles, including the Chinese editions of Cosmopolitan, Esquire and Good Housekeeping. Under Trends' partnership with Hearst Corporation, the group held editorial control over the Chinese Bazaar, and its editor used that freedom to run content from an original perspective about Chinese culture, art and poetry rather than simply reproducing the American edition. That local control distinguished the Chinese title within the Bazaar network and matched the wider pattern of Chinese glossies: the licence, the paper, the staff and the censorship responsibilities were Chinese, while the brand, design language and part of the content were international. Trends used the flagship's success to extend the name, launching spin-off titles that included Bazaar Men, Bazaar Jewellery and Bazaar Art, part of a dozen fashion and lifestyle magazines its leading publisher helped to create, among them Trends Home. Harper's Bazaar Men was itself billed as China's first commercial men's magazine.

Su Mang: Publisher, Editor and Public Figure

No Chinese fashion title was identified with one person as completely as Harper's Bazaar China was with Su Mang. Born on 15 October 1971 in Jinan, Shandong, she trained at the China Conservatory of Music, graduating in 1991, then decided against a musical career and sought work as a writer at the newly created Trends Magazine. By the mid-1990s, as Western fashion labels entered the Chinese market, she was head of advertising at the growing Trends group; in 2001 she became its chief executive, and around the same time the company partnered with the American Bazaar, making her the Chinese edition's founding editor. An oft-told story held that Su Mang and her long-time fashion director, Sha Xiaoli, pulled together the magazine's first editorial team in under ten days before the first issue appeared in November 2001. She went on to serve as the title's executive publisher and then editor-in-chief until 2018, while rising to president and chief executive of the whole Trends Media Group, and she was listed in the BoF 500 every year from 2014. In March 2018 Trends announced her resignation, citing personal reasons; she left the company two months later, ending twenty-four years with the group, and later registered a consultancy business of her own.

Editorial Position and Readers

Harper's Bazaar China defined its reader precisely: successful women over twenty-five, with high incomes, good taste, a love of fashion and a pursuit of perfection. Its content mixed international fashion, beauty and celebrity coverage with material made in China, and its editors were given the freedom under the Hearst partnership to approach Chinese culture, art and poetry from an original perspective. In the ranking of Chinese glossies, Bazaar, Elle and Vogue were described as the holy trinity of fashion magazines in the 2000s, and their three editors — Su Mang, Xiao Xue and Angelica Cheung — were credited collectively with building China's fashion media culture over several decades, each of them arriving from a business rather than a purely editorial background. That business instinct showed in the brand's extensions and events as much as in its pages. Academic study of the magazine's later years examined how thoroughly it localised the American format, treating the Chinese Bazaar not as an imported product but as a domestic fashion institution that happened to carry a famous foreign name — an institution strong enough to shape China's modelling, clothing and fashion photography industries as they grew up alongside it.

Bazaar Stars' Charity Night

The magazine's most famous creation was not an issue but an event. Bazaar Stars' Charity Night was founded in 2003, during the outbreak of SARS, when the Harper's Bazaar China team felt that journalists who promoted luxury had a social responsibility to contribute; the singer Na Ying suggested auctioning clothes and items owned by celebrities and donating the proceeds to the poor. The first gala raised 167,504 yuan, and in 2004 the team adopted the idea that would define it — in Su Mang's formulation, to "let charity become a kind of fashion." The event was held every year thereafter. Its tenth anniversary edition took place in Beijing in 2012; from 2014 the charity night was produced in collaboration with Zhejiang Television, which broadcast it nationally; and by its fourteenth installment, held on 9 September 2016 with the internet company Tencent, Harper's Bazaar China and its partners had raised more than 320 million yuan in total and worked with more than thirty-nine charities, supporting causes from impoverished children and medical aid to disaster recovery. The 2015 edition alone, hosted at the China World Trade Center in Beijing with more than fifty celebrities attending, raised over 41 million yuan to build a better ambulance system for impoverished areas. No other Chinese magazine event matched its combination of fashion, celebrity and measurable fundraising.

Digital Experiments and the Fan Economy

Like every Chinese glossy, Harper's Bazaar China had to answer the collapse of print economics with digital invention, and its most studied experiment was the Bazaar Star electronic magazine. Researchers examining the title's new-media strategy described how the Chinese edition built celebrity-led electronic issues aimed squarely at fan communities, using the fan economy — the organised spending of celebrities' followers — to sell localised content that a declining paper magazine could not. The first celebrity e-magazine issues were designed to meet fans' desire to know more about the stars they followed, with interviews tied to current hit dramas and distribution through the social platforms where fan groups lived. The strategy turned the magazine's oldest asset, its access to celebrities built up through covers and the Charity Night, into a digital product. Alongside the e-magazine, the brand maintained the usual apparatus of a modern Chinese fashion title — web and social editions feeding the print flagship — and staged brand gatherings such as the 2023 Bazaar Icons annual party in Shanghai, which brought together figures from fashion, film, music and art. The direction of travel was the same as at its rivals: the printed monthly remained the prestige object, but growth and revenue experimentation happened on phones.

After Su Mang: The Sha Xiaoli Succession

Su Mang's departure in 2018 closed the founding era. Her successor was the insider the industry expected: Sha Xiaoli, the fashion director who had helped assemble the first editorial team in 2001 and had served as Su Mang's loyal lieutenant for the whole of her tenure. On Su Mang's exit, Sha stepped into the joint roles of editor-in-chief and general manager — reference listings recorded the editorship from 2018 under her name — and cut a noticeably lower public profile than her predecessor, who had been a fixture of television interviews and red carpets. The change mirrored the simultaneous successions at Elle China and Vogue China, where long-serving deputies likewise replaced celebrity editors; commentators described the new generation's task as keeping a well-oiled machine running while fending off competition from key opinion leaders and other digital-first publishers. Sha was still representing the magazine as its executive publisher and editor-in-chief at its 2023 annual party, where the title's leadership appeared alongside the Fashion Media Group's chairman — evidence that, two decades after its launch, the Chinese Bazaar remained an active, event-led brand rather than a legacy print title winding down.

Place in Chinese Fashion Publishing

Harper's Bazaar China's career summarised the second wave of international magazine publishing in China. Where Elle had pioneered the co-publication model in 1988, Bazaar showed in 2001 how a strong local group — Trends, with its eighteen titles and its own distribution and advertising power — could take an American brand older than the Chinese state itself and rebuild it as a Chinese institution with genuine editorial control. Its staged birth, from Best China Fashion in 2001 through the 2002 copyright cooperation to the full Bazaar name in 2005, was the licensing system working exactly as designed. Under Su Mang it produced a defining editor-publisher of the Chinese fashion era, a family of spin-offs including Bazaar Men, Bazaar Art and Bazaar Jewellery, and in the Charity Night a fundraising institution that raised hundreds of millions of yuan and changed what a fashion magazine was expected to do in public life. With Elle and Vogue it formed the trio that set the standard for Chinese glossies, and its history — licence, local empire, charity gala, digital reinvention — was the fullest example of how a foreign masthead became, in practice, a Chinese magazine.