About Ningxia Daily

Ningxia Daily

Ningxia Daily, known in Chinese as Ningxia Ribao, is the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Committee of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, published in Chinese in Yinchuan by the Ningxia Daily Newspaper Group. It is one of the few Chinese provincial-level party newspapers that has been founded twice. It first appeared on 11 November 1949 as the organ of the CCP Ningxia Provincial Committee, ceased publication on 31 August 1954 when Ningxia Province was abolished and merged into Gansu, and was founded again on 1 August 1958, on the eve of the creation of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. That double founding, driven entirely by changes in the region's administrative status, makes the paper's history a direct register of Ningxia's own twentieth-century history.

The first Ningxia Daily, 1949–1954

The paper's first life began weeks after the People's Liberation Army took the Ningxia provincial capital. Chinese reference works record that PLA forces occupied Yinchuan on 23 September 1949, and that on 11 November 1949 the CCP Ningxia Provincial Committee launched Ningxia Daily as its organ. On 21 December 1949 the paper adopted a masthead written by Mao Zedong, who was then chairman of the Central People's Government — an early mark of the paper's official standing. The first Ningxia Daily served a province that existed only briefly in its early-1950s form. In August 1954 Gansu and Ningxia provinces were merged, Ningxia ceased to exist as a separate province, and on 31 August 1954 the paper stopped publication. A scholarly table of newspapers of the early People's Republic likewise lists Ningxia Ribao in Yinchuan with a founding date of 11 November 1949 and a closing date of 31 August 1954.

Refounding in 1958 and the autonomous region

The decision to restore Ningxia, this time as a Hui autonomous region, brought the paper back. On 1 August 1958, shortly before the new region was formally established, Ningxia Daily was founded for a second time, and on 25 October 1958 the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region was proclaimed with Yinchuan as its capital. Reference listings of the paper therefore give 1 August 1958 as its formal founding date, while its own historiography counts from both foundings. The paper's publishing house marked the fortieth anniversary of the 1958 refounding on 1 August 1998 by issuing a Brief History of Ningxia Daily, covering 1958 to 1997, for which its editors had worked since a history office was set up in 1991: they compiled nine collections of historical materials totalling roughly 500,000 characters before drafting the history itself from March 1997. That volume describes Ningxia Daily as the autonomous region's most influential newspaper and records that more than 1,600 people had worked for the paper over its first four decades.

Ownership and the newspaper group

The paper's owner is the CCP Committee of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, and its publisher is the Ningxia Daily Newspaper Group, the region's principal newspaper organisation, headquartered with the paper in Yinchuan. As the regional party organ, Ningxia Daily is the autonomous region's newspaper of official record: it carries the regional party committee's positions and the proceedings of regional government, and its reporting is produced today by journalists identified in its pages as all-media reporters of the Ningxia Daily Newspaper Group. The group's continuing public role is illustrated by its activity in October 2026, when the group hosted a tour of Ningxia for editors of 26 major national news apps and accounts, taking some forty editors and senior reporters through Yinchuan, Shizuishan and Wuzhong to report on the region's industries and tourism.

Editorial tradition as the paper records it

The Brief History of Ningxia Daily summarises the paper's working tradition in terms standard for Chinese party newspapers but documented specifically for this title: it says the paper consistently followed the principles summarised as "the whole party runs the newspaper" and "the masses run the newspaper", publicised the party's line, principles and policies, reported Ningxia's socialist construction, and promoted model experiences and advanced figures; after the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee in 1978, it records, the paper centred its work on economic construction. The volume is candid, in its own preface, that the paper's forty years included mistakes and lessons as well as successes. The history project itself — a dedicated history office, nine volumes of collected materials and a published institutional history — is part of the paper's documented identity: few newspapers of Ningxia's size have left as deliberate an archival record of their own development.

A publishing house inside the newspaper

One distinctive episode in the group's history is its relationship with Ningxia People's Publishing House, the region's main book publisher, founded in Yinchuan on 1 January 1959. In April 1962 the publishing house was abolished and merged into Ningxia Daily Press, so that for a period the region's book publishing was administered from inside the newspaper organisation. During the Cultural Revolution the publisher was placed under the regional office for Mao Zedong's works and shared premises with the Ningxia Xinhua Bookstore, before its independent establishment was restored in May 1974. The episode is documented in the publishing house's own history and shows how, in a small autonomous region, the party newspaper's institution at times carried functions well beyond the daily paper itself.

Sister titles: Xin Xiaoxi Bao

The group's best-known subsidiary is Xin Xiaoxi Bao (New News Paper), founded in 2000 and supervised and published by Ningxia Daily Press. Chinese newspaper directories describe it as the autonomous region's only provincial-level metropolitan newspaper, positioned in its own slogan as "our ordinary people's own newspaper", and record that it led Ningxia's newspapers in daily circulation, retail sales and distribution range. The same directory profile reports that in its first five years the paper met successive growth targets, that its page count, circulation, coverage, advertising income and profit all ranked first in the region's newspaper industry, and that in 2004 it made a profit of nearly 10 million yuan, a margin of close to 30 percent. Its editor-in-chief in that period, Sha Xin, was simultaneously a deputy editor-in-chief of Ningxia Daily. Those figures describe the subsidiary at its commercial peak in the mid-2000s; no comparably sourced current circulation figure for the flagship Ningxia Daily is published, and none is claimed here.

Sister titles: the legal paper and Blog World

A second group title has a longer lineage. The Ningxia legal newspaper began in 1982 as Ningxia Fazhi Bao; at the end of 2003 it was transferred to the Ningxia Daily Newspaper Group, renamed Fazhi Xinbao, and in 2015, with regulatory approval, renamed again as Ningxia Fazhi Bao (Ningxia Legal News). Group and directory sources describe it as Ningxia's only newspaper devoted to political-legal work and legal affairs, and as an important member of the group. The flagship paper has also lent its name to magazine ventures: on 15 October 2008 a periodical published by Ningxia Daily, Licai Shijie (Money World), was renamed Boke Tianxia (Blog World), a title that went on to wider recognition as a current-affairs magazine brand originating from the Ningxia Daily stable.

Digital presence

Ningxia Daily publishes a full digital edition of the print paper: its e-paper is hosted under the group's nxrb.cn domain, reproducing the printed pages, including the bylines of the group's all-media reporters. The group's newspapers also function as the region's standard vehicles for official and legal notices: Ningxia Daily, Xin Xiaoxi Bao and Ningxia Fazhi Bao are all provincial-level papers whose published announcements — lost-document declarations, company and administrative notices — are accepted by government service windows across the autonomous region, a routine but documented part of a Chinese party newspaper's public function. Together with its news websites and mobile output, the digital edition has shifted the paper from a print-only provincial organ to one whose pages are read primarily as part of the group's all-media output, while the printed daily remains the edition of record.

Place in Ningxia's media system

Ningxia is one of China's smallest provincial-level units by population, and Ningxia Daily's documented record should be read at that scale. Its importance is institutional rather than commercial: it is the autonomous region party committee's own newspaper, founded and refounded in step with the region's administrative creation in 1949 and 1958, custodian of a written history of itself that its staff spent most of a decade compiling, and parent of the region's metropolitan and legal newspapers. The paper's two foundings — and the four-year silence between its 1954 closure and its 1958 return — give it a biography unlike any other paper in this series: when Ningxia existed, it had a Ningxia Daily; when Ningxia was abolished, the paper ceased; and when the autonomous region was created, the paper was refounded before the region itself was proclaimed.