About Hongxing News

Hongxing News / Red Star News

Hongxing News, known in English as Red Star News and published at cdsb.com from Chengdu, China, is a mobile-first news outlet created by the Chengdu Media Group and incubated by the Chengdu Economic Daily — the Chengdu Business Daily. Launched in January 2017, it was built as the digital transformation of one of western China's strongest metropolitan newspapers, and it grew with unusual speed: within its first years it described itself as a phenomenal new media brand, reported monthly reading volumes in the hundreds of millions across China's major content platforms, and by 2019 said its platform had reached over 70 million users. Red Star News takes originality, investigation and commentary as its core strengths, and aims to be a new media brand with international influence and tens of millions of followers. Its 2019 launch of a dedicated Belt and Road International News Channel — the first by a mainstream Chinese media outlet after the second Belt and Road Forum — showed how a city newspaper's digital offshoot had acquired national and international ambitions.

The parent paper: Chengdu Economic Daily

Red Star News cannot be understood without the newspaper that incubated it. The Chengdu Economic Daily, known in Chinese as Chengdu Shangbao (Chengdu Business Daily), was founded on 1 January 1994. It began as an internal paper of the Chengdu finance and trade commission — initially a small-format paper that could not be publicly distributed — before its publishers built a distribution network that also delivered books and daily goods and acted as agent for other papers and periodicals. Within three years its daily circulation had risen from 50,000 to 600,000 copies, its advertising revenue had passed 300 million yuan and its pagination had grown to 24 pages, overtaking its local rival to become Chengdu's largest-circulation newspaper. Published by the Chengdu Daily newspaper group and headquartered on Hongxing Road in Chengdu — the street from which Red Star News takes its name — it became the newspaper with the largest circulation and the highest advertising revenue in western China, with daily circulation of about 650,000 copies in 2005, roughly 50 to 60 percent of Chengdu's daily newspaper market, and later figures of about 800,000 copies.

A model of newspaper transformation

In the accounts given at Red Star News's own launches, the Chengdu Economic Daily is presented as the typical example of newspaper transformation in China after reform and opening up: a paper that won first place in many aspects and ranked at the top in circulation and influence in western China, and that, in the internet era, set out to transform itself into Red Star News in all aspects. The parent group reinforced that position: Chengdu Media Group ranked first among comparable Chinese newspaper groups for comprehensive communication influence in 2019 and had ranked among the top three such groups nationally for overall economic scale for eight consecutive years. It was this group — not a technology start-up — that created Red Star News, and the new outlet was a news media key-supported and built by the Chengdu authorities.

From WeChat account to launch in January 2017

The road to launch ran through social platforms. On 24 August 2016 a WeChat public account was opened under the Red Star News name; two days later it was renamed the Chengdu Business Daily News Centre, and on 7 February 2017 it was certified as Red Star News. The outlet itself was founded by Chengdu Media Group on 9 January 2017. Red Star News also moved onto Sina Weibo and Jinri Toutiao, and it was embedded within the Chengdu Business Daily's own app, so that the newspaper's existing mobile readers met the new brand inside a product they already used. The judgement offered by its parent group is that in 2017 Red Star News became a phenomenal media soon after its launching — a claim its subsequent audience figures were used to support.

The app takes the Red Star name

The clearest institutional marker of the transformation came on 1 November 2018, when the Chengdu Business Daily client — the newspaper's mobile app — was renamed the Red Star News client. The flagship mobile product of the group no longer carried the newspaper's name but the new media brand's, completing on the phone the shift that the 2017 launch had begun. From then on, Red Star News was not a supplement to the paper but the group's principal mobile news identity, with the website at cdsb.com retaining the initials of Chengdu Shangbao as a link to its origin. The group's wider strategy moved in the same direction: in 2019 Chengdu Media Group proposed, at group level, the concept of a "smart media group," taking the new smart media group as an important part of its strategic goals.

Scale: hundreds of millions of monthly reads, 70 million users

Red Star News's growth was measured across China's platform ecosystem rather than on its own properties alone. By July 2018 Red Star News's combined monthly read volume across three major platforms — Jinri Toutiao, Tencent's platforms and Baidu's Baijiahao — exceeded 300 million. By April 2019, when it launched its international channel, the platform had reached over 70 million users. Those figures describe the model of a Chinese converged-media outlet of its period: reporting produced by a newspaper group's newsroom, distributed at scale through the recommendation platforms where Chinese readers actually were, alongside its own app and website. The outlet's stated ambition matched the numbers — to create a new media brand with international influence and tens of millions of followers, with originality, investigation and commentary as its core force.

Hongxing Hao: opening the platform to institutions

On 19 August 2018 Red Star News opened its own content platform, Hongxing Hao ("Red Star Accounts"), allowing Party and government organs, enterprises and institutions, experts and scholars, and self-media creators to settle on the platform and publish through it. The move followed the pattern set by China's large content platforms, turning Red Star News from a publisher of its own reporting into a host for institutional voices in its home region and beyond. Combined with its distribution across Toutiao, Tencent and Baijiahao, Hongxing Hao made the outlet an aggregator as well as a newsroom — a single Chengdu-based brand through which official bodies, companies and commentators could reach the audience Red Star News had assembled.

The Belt and Road International News Channel

On 30 April 2019, at a ceremony in Beijing, Red Star News officially launched its "Belt and Road" International News Channel. It was the first mainstream media outlet to launch such a channel immediately after the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, which had just concluded. Group officials presented the launch as a pioneering step to expand the outlet's international influence, and the channel was accompanied by plans to open a news centre in Southeast Asia within the year. For a brand that had begun less than two and a half years earlier as a Chengdu newspaper's mobile experiment, launching a dedicated international channel in the capital marked a striking change of scale — and reflected the outlet's self-description as a new type of mobile mainstream media, rather than a local paper's website.

Reporting identity and place in Chengdu's media group

Red Star News's bylines appear across Chinese and international coverage alike — its reporters' work is cited on subjects from Chengdu's metropolitan development to science-fiction publishing and national business news — and the brand functions inside Chengdu Media Group as the group's news flagship for the mobile era. The group's experiments continued around it: in December 2021 a Chengdu Media Group lecture series on smart media and the future was hosted from Red Star News's virtual studio, with the outlet's video and visual centre staff demonstrating remote production. The parent newspaper, meanwhile, slimmed down for the new-media era, reducing its print pagination to 12 pages on weekdays and eight on holidays — the physical paper shrinking as its digital successor grew.

Red Star News today

Red Star News today is the digital heir of a newspaper founded in 1994 that once sold some 800,000 copies a day in western China. Created by Chengdu Media Group on 9 January 2017, incubated within the Chengdu Economic Daily's app and accounts, renamed onto the group's flagship app in November 2018, and extended through Hongxing Hao and the Belt and Road International News Channel, it reports from Chengdu for a national audience measured in the tens of millions. Its official listing among China's recognised internet news sources reflects its status as a mainstream outlet. At cdsb.com and in its app, Red Star News carries the group's original reporting, investigations and commentary — the transformation, in one brand, of a metropolitan business daily into a mobile news platform.