About Xuzhou Daily

Xuzhou Daily

Xuzhou Daily (Xuzhou Ribao, 徐州日报) is the official newspaper of the Xuzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), published in Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, and associated with the Xuzhou Daily press group. It is the municipal party daily for one of the most strategically placed cities in eastern China: a prefecture-level city in northwestern Jiangsu at the junction of four provinces, a national transport hub where China's great north–south and east–west railway lines cross, the central city of the Huaihai Economic Zone, and a historic industrial base built first on coal and then on construction machinery. Trade-press reporting has described Xuzhou Daily as its publishing group's top-selling regional title. For anyone following how Xuzhou governs itself, rebuilds its industrial economy and speaks to the wider Huaihai region, Xuzhou Daily is the city's paper of record.

Identity and Role as a Municipal Party Newspaper

In China's press system, party committees at provincial, prefectural and county level publish party newspapers, and Xuzhou Daily occupies the prefectural, or municipal, tier for Xuzhou. As the official newspaper of the Xuzhou Municipal Committee of the CCP, its primary function is authoritative communication: the decisions, meetings and policy priorities of the municipal leadership appear in its pages in official form. Government offices, public institutions, enterprises and schools across Xuzhou read the municipal daily to know the city's official line, and ordinary residents read it to follow the affairs of their own districts and counties.

The publishing operation behind the paper has been reported on internationally in the printing trade press. Xuzhou's publishing group — referred to in that reporting as Xuzhou Press Media — installed a two-tower newspaper press with four reelstands and two folders in 2001, and, eleven years later, ordered a further single-tower heatset press to move into semi-commercial printing, a sector then described as flourishing in China. In addition to its own regional title, the top-selling Xuzhou Daily, the group printed other titles including the national party paper People's Daily and Jiangsu's provincial party paper Xinhua Daily. That detail captures the group's dual role: a local publisher in its own right, and part of the production network that physically delivers national and provincial party newspapers to readers in northern Jiangsu.

The City It Serves: Xuzhou at the Junction of Four Provinces

Xuzhou, known in ancient times as Pengcheng, is a prefecture-level city in northwestern Jiangsu. Located at the junction of four provinces — Jiangsu, Shandong, Henan and Anhui — it occupies a natural geographic gap between the Shandong Hills and the North China Plain. As of the 2020 census it had a population of approximately 9.08 million, across a prefecture-level area of about 11,259 square kilometres. Xuzhou is a provincial sub-centre of Jiangsu, the central city of the Huaihai Economic Zone, and a designated important node city of the Belt and Road Initiative. Its traditional description as a “thoroughfare of five provinces” reflects a gateway role that long predates modern transport.

That geography defines the newspaper's territory. Xuzhou's hinterland is not only its own districts and counties; culturally and economically it looks across provincial borders into southern Shandong, eastern Henan and northern Anhui. Reporting that in Nanjing or Suzhou would be provincial news is, in Xuzhou, regional news with direct consequences for trade, transport, employment and family life. A municipal daily at a four-province junction inevitably serves a readership whose horizons are wider than a single province, and Xuzhou Daily's coverage of Huaihai-region affairs reflects that position.

A National Transport Hub

Transport is the first fact of Xuzhou's modern history, and a standing theme of its daily newspaper. The Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal runs through Xuzhou, and the city sits at the strategic intersection of the north–south Beijing–Shanghai axis and the east–west Land Bridge corridor. Following the Revolution of 1911, the completion of the Tianjin–Pukou railway in 1912 and of the Kaifeng–Xuzhou section of the Longhai railway in 1915 established Xuzhou as a rail junction; a line east to the Yellow Sea port of Lianyungang, opened in 1934, is now part of the Longhai Railway. Xuzhou Railway Station stands at the intersection of the Beijing–Shanghai (Jinghu) Railway and the Longhai Railway, while Xuzhou East Railway Station, on the eastern outskirts, is the junction of the Beijing–Shanghai and Xuzhou–Lanzhou high-speed railways.

For the newspaper, the hub is not background colour but daily news: railway operations, road and air connections — Xuzhou is linked by motorway and rail to big cities including Shanghai and has a domestic airport — freight flows between north and south and between the coast and the interior, and the development of the districts that have grown around the high-speed railway. A city whose prosperity depends on movement reports movement closely, and disruption or expansion at the junction is front-page material in a way it would never be in a less connected city.

From Coal: The Old Industrial Base

Xuzhou's second defining industry was coal. The city served historically as a prominent supplier of coal to the Yangtze River Delta region, and coal nourished its economy for some 130 years. Mining shaped whole districts: in Jiawang District, to the north of the city centre, a large share of the population once earned its living in the mines. It also left heavy costs. Xinhua reporting on Xuzhou's green transformation noted that coal mining caused severe air pollution from coal ash and dust, that resources later became depleted and the economy lost much of its vitality, and that mining subsidence rendered approximately 423,300 mu — about 28,220 hectares — of land unsuitable for farming. Reuters reported that Xuzhou shut its coal pits after 130 years of mining, while the city's main mining firm continued to produce coal, coal chemicals and coal-fired power from projects elsewhere.

The long work of repair is now one of the city's biggest stories, and therefore one of its newspaper's. Jiawang District alone has implemented more than 80 projects to address land subsidence, and its most severely affected area has been transformed into Pan'an Lake National Wetland Park — wetlands, birds and boats where a landscape scarred by collapsed mines had stood less than a decade earlier. Xuzhou has focused on green development, transforming and upgrading its traditional industries, reducing energy consumption and eliminating polluting chemical enterprises, with a cumulative decrease of 34.5 percent in energy consumption per unit of GDP reported by Xinhua. More recently, disused mine workings have even been turned to new energy uses, with naturally cool underground mine water used to cool homes — a project reported as cutting energy consumption substantially compared with traditional methods. The arc from coal base to green transformation is the central economic narrative of modern Xuzhou, and the municipal daily chronicles it decision by decision.

Construction Machinery: The City of XCMG

If coal was Xuzhou's past, construction machinery is its present signature. Xuzhou is known as a capital of engineering machinery in China, and at the centre of that industry stands XCMG — Xuzhou Construction Machinery Group — a Chinese state-owned multinational manufacturer of construction and heavy machinery headquartered in Xuzhou, and one of the world's largest construction equipment producers. XCMG traces its origins to predecessor enterprises including Huaxing Iron Factory, established in 1943, which later became Xuzhou Heavy Machinery Factory. In 1957 that factory trial-produced XCMG's first tower crane; China's first 10-tonne steamroller followed in 1960, and its first 5-tonne truck-mounted crane in 1963. XCMG Group was formally established in Xuzhou in March 1989, integrating three factories and a research institute — the first group company in China's construction machinery industry — and its principal operating subsidiary has been listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange since 1996.

The scale of the cluster around XCMG makes it unavoidable local news. Reporting on the group's thirtieth anniversary in 2019 noted that the 100-billion-level construction machinery sector led by XCMG was not only one of Xuzhou's leading industries but a shining business card for the city, that more than 20 XCMG branches stood in the east of the city, and that the east — with the Xuzhou Economic and Technological Development Zone and the high-speed railway — had become a core area of China's city of construction machinery. For Xuzhou Daily, XCMG's product launches, export performance, anniversaries and expansions are simultaneously business news, employment news and civic pride, in the way a single dominant manufacturer's fortunes always are in the city that hosts and names it.

Covering Government and Huaihai-Region Affairs

As the municipal committee's official newspaper, Xuzhou Daily's core coverage is Xuzhou government: the committee's and municipal government's decisions, the implementation of provincial and national policy in Xuzhou, and the administration of its districts, counties and county-level cities. Because Xuzhou is the central city of the Huaihai Economic Zone — a status approved by the State Council in 2017 — that government coverage has a regional dimension unusual for a municipal paper. Xuzhou's ambition to act as the core city for the surrounding areas of four provinces, coordinating development across a region that no single province contains, is pursued through exactly the kind of plans, meetings and agreements that an official daily exists to publish and explain.

The paper's regional remit also reflects lived reality. Xuzhou's transport junction, its hospitals, universities and markets serve people from across the Huaihai area, and its industrial economy recruits and trades across provincial lines. Reporting on regional cooperation, cross-border infrastructure and the zone's economic development is therefore not foreign news for Xuzhou Daily; it is home news for a city whose functional region ignores the provincial boundary on the map.

History and Culture in the Newspaper's Pages

Xuzhou is one of the most ancient cities of Jiangsu, with a history of more than 4,000 years, and it has been designated a National Famous Historical and Cultural City since 1986 for its relics — especially its Han dynasty heritage. The city is the ancestral home region of the Han imperial family, and its celebrated remains include Han terracotta warriors, the mausoleums of Han princes, and Han dynasty stone relief art. Its strategic gap between the hills was fought over repeatedly across Chinese history, from the contests of the late Qin and early Han to the Huaihai Campaign of 1948, one of the decisive campaigns of the Chinese Civil War, after which Xuzhou was temporarily administered as part of Shandong before being returned to Jiangsu when the province was restored in 1953.

For a daily newspaper, this heritage is a living beat rather than a museum label. Excavations, museum exhibitions, memorial sites such as the Huaihai Campaign Memorial Park, Yunlong Lake and the city's historic quarters all generate continuing coverage, and they support a cultural-tourism economy that sits alongside the industrial one. Xuzhou Daily reports a city that is at once an ancient Pengcheng, a railway crossroads, a former coal base and a modern machinery capital — and its readers hold all of those identities at the same time.

Xuzhou Daily in the Jiangsu Press Landscape

Within Jiangsu, Xuzhou Daily operates below the provincial tier represented by Xinhua Daily, the official newspaper of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the CCP, and alongside the province's other municipal dailies and commercial titles. Its distinct value is geographic as much as editorial. Jiangsu's economic and media centre of gravity lies in the south, along the Yangtze; Xuzhou, in the far northwest of the province and closer in daily life to Shandong, Henan and Anhui, needs its own paper of record, and the fact that its publishing group also printed People's Daily and Xinhua Daily for local distribution underlines how the national, provincial and municipal tiers of the party press interlock in a hub city.

That position makes Xuzhou Daily a primary source for researchers and businesses following northern Jiangsu and the Huaihai region: the record of the coal closures and the wetland restoration that followed them, of XCMG's growth from a 1943 iron works into a global machinery group, of the high-speed rail era at the junction, and of Xuzhou's post-2017 project to lead the Huaihai Economic Zone is kept, day by day, in its pages.

Why Xuzhou Daily Matters

Xuzhou Daily matters because Xuzhou matters — as the crossing point of China's north–south and east–west trunk routes, as the centre of the Huaihai region, and as a test case for how a resource-based industrial city reinvents itself. Few Chinese cities have had to manage so many transitions at once: from canal port to railway junction, from coal supplier to green-transformation pioneer, from old industrial base to construction-machinery capital and new-energy aspirant. Each of those transitions has been decided, announced, debated and recorded locally, and the municipal party daily is where that record appears in its official and most continuous form.

For residents, the paper remains a practical guide to municipal decisions affecting work, transport, environment and services. For the wider Huaihai region, it is the voice of the zone's central city. And for readers beyond Jiangsu, Xuzhou Daily offers a ground-level view of industrial China in transition — reported not from the coastal megacities, but from the crossroads city where the trains, the coal history and the cranes meet.