About Huizhou Daily

Huizhou Daily

Huizhou Daily (Chinese: 惠州日报; pinyin: Huizhou Ribao) is a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Huizhou, Guangdong Province, in southern China. It is the official newspaper of the Huizhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the flagship title of the Huizhou Newspaper Media Group. The newspaper traces its origin to Dongjiang Daily, the first party newspaper founded in Huizhou after the city's liberation in October 1949, and its own history — marked by renamings, suspensions and revivals over more than seven decades — closely mirrors the administrative and economic transformation of the Dongjiang region it serves. Today the daily appears in print and as the anchor of an all-media group whose combined platforms, according to the group, reach more than three million readers, netizens and followers a day.

Origins in the liberation of Huizhou

Huizhou Daily's predecessor, Dongjiang Daily, was born on 16 October 1949, the day after Huizhou was declared liberated. On 15 October 1949, troops of the Guangdong-Gansu-Xiangbian Column marched into Huizhou City, and the Dongjiang Military Control Commission, established the same day, ordered the creation of a newspaper. Huang Qiuyun, a 31-year-old graduate of the Department of Chinese Literature at Tsinghua University who had served as an intelligence staff officer with the column, was appointed chief editor, and Rong Ke served as president. A team of more than ten staff was drawn from the column's cultural work troupe and its mass newspaper to do the editorial work.

Working with printing presses, ink and paper left behind by the former Kuomintang newspaper Yuedong Daily, the new team edited and printed the first party newspaper of liberated Huizhou. The inaugural issue carried the announcement of the Dongjiang Military Control Commission proclaiming Huizhou's liberation, reports on the war situation in South China, Hong Kong citizens' reactions to the liberation of Guangzhou, and the discipline of the People's Liberation Army. Posted on bulletin boards along Zhongshan West Road and other main streets, the issue's 6,000 copies sold out within an hour — a sensation in a city of just over 30,000 people at the time.

Becoming the Dongjiang party committee's organ

On 1 December 1949 the Dongjiang Local Committee of the Chinese Communist Party was established and Dongjiang Daily became its organ newspaper. Personnel from Yuegan Bao, the newspaper of another detachment of the column, joined the staff; Zhuo Yang, the prefectural committee's propaganda director, served concurrently as the paper's director, and Chen Pei became editor-in-chief. The paper appeared as a four-page lead-printed daily, reporting mainly local news alongside major national and international news, with literary supplements and service columns, and it circulated across the counties administered by the Dongjiang Administrative Committee — a vast area that included today's Huizhou, Heyuan, Shanwei, Shenzhen and Dongguan, as well as Zengcheng, Conghua and Wuhua counties.

The newspaper's first offices were in the Wanghu Building of today's Huizhou Hotel: a typesetting room and printing workshop on the first floor, the editorial department on the second, and a collective dormitory on the third. Reporting in the early 1950s meant travelling for days into mountainous countryside, and, in the unsettled conditions of the time, reporters carried pistols on assignment while staff took turns standing guard at night. Despite those conditions, the paper maintained daily publication and focused its reporting on consolidating the new administration and building the local economy.

Renamings, suspension and revival

As the region's administration changed, so did the newspaper's name and fortunes. Chinese press histories of the paper record that it was renamed several times in the early 1950s, including a period as a farmers' daily pitched at rural readers — at one point using Hakka mountain songs, a popular local form in the largely Hakka Dongjiang basin, to explain land reform to peasant readers. In December 1952, when the Dongjiang Special District was abolished, the paper was discontinued and merged into a provincial farmers' newspaper, leaving Huizhou with only a reporter station.

Publication resumed in 1972 under the Huiyang name, with trial issues reporting in detail on agricultural and industrial production across the region, produced by a staff of 31 cadres and workers crowded into about 150 square metres in the prefectural party committee compound. In January 1976 the paper was suspended again by decision of the provincial party committee, and the Huiyang area had no newspaper of its own for the following decade. Dongjiang Daily resumed publication in February 1986, as reform and opening up transformed the Pearl River Delta.

Taking the Huizhou Daily name

The revived paper grew with the city it served. On 1 September 1988 it jointly founded, with the Huizhou Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and the Huizhou Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, a monthly newspaper for Huizhou people abroad, distributed to hometown associations in Southeast Asia, North America, Europe and Hong Kong; it published 81 issues, with an annual circulation of 48,000 copies, before ceasing publication in August 1996.

In October 1990 the paper was renamed, and on 1 October 1993 it took the name Huizhou Daily. Its format changed with the name: what had been a small-format paper appearing on limited days of the week became a folio four-page paper, and in 1994 it expanded to daily publication. The sequence — a party daily for a prefecture becoming the named daily of a fast-growing prefecture-level city — reflects Huizhou's own rise within the Pearl River Delta during the 1990s.

Coverage of Huizhou and the Daya Bay economy

As Huizhou's party newspaper, Huizhou Daily reports the work of the municipal party committee and government and covers the development of a city that has become one of Guangdong's industrial centres. Its reporting remit, as described in its own anniversary histories, has consistently followed the centre of the city's work: in the 1950s that meant production and consolidation; in the reform era it meant the growth of a coastal economy anchored by the Daya Bay area, where petrochemical and electronics industries have become the city's signature sectors. The newspaper also covers the counties and districts under Huizhou's administration, local culture in a region with deep Hakka roots, and the affairs of a city that sits on the eastern edge of the Pearl River Delta within the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

A training ground for Guangdong journalism

Huizhou Daily's anniversary histories emphasize the journalists it trained. Dongjiang Daily was founded a week earlier than Nanfang Daily, the Guangdong provincial party newspaper founded on 23 October 1949, and it supplied Nanfang Daily with two editors-in-chief: Chen Pei, who succeeded Huang Qiuyun in Huizhou, later served as Nanfang Daily's editor-in-chief from 1983 to 1986, and Zhang Chun, who joined Dongjiang Daily as a reporter and editor in the winter of 1949, led Nanfang Daily from January 1987 to May 1991. Huang Qiuyun himself went on to editorial posts at Nanfang Daily and Yangcheng Evening News and to a career in literary criticism and prose. Other early staff, such as the reporter Tang Yu, rose to lead Guangdong's provincial cultural administration. The newspaper preserves this history in the Newspaper History Museum maintained by its media group, where yellowed runs of its successive titles are displayed.

Formation of the Huizhou Newspaper Media Group

On 26 September 2007 the Huizhou Newspaper Media Group was established on the basis of Huizhou Daily. The group brought the daily and its sister operations into a single media organisation at a time when Chinese city newspaper groups were consolidating print titles and building digital businesses. For Huizhou Daily, group status meant the party daily became the flagship of a broader portfolio rather than a standalone newspaper, with shared printing, distribution and new-media operations supporting its continued daily publication.

Digital expansion and the all-media group

Today, according to the group's own anniversary account, the Huizhou Newspaper Media Group has developed from a single daily into a comprehensive new-media group with a complete all-media system spanning print media, online media, mobile clients, Weibo, WeChat and outdoor media, covering more than three million readers, netizens and fans every day. Huizhou Daily sits at the centre of that system as its founding and flagship title: the authoritative print record of the municipal party committee, extended across the group's digital channels.

Huizhou Daily at a glance

Huizhou Daily is a Chinese-language daily newspaper based in Huizhou, Guangdong. It is the official newspaper of the Huizhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, published within the Huizhou Newspaper Media Group, which was established on 26 September 2007. Founded as Dongjiang Daily on 16 October 1949, renamed and suspended several times — including a ten-year suspension from 1976 — and revived in 1986, it took its present name on 1 October 1993 and became a daily in 1994. It covers Huizhou's government, its petrochemical and electronics industries and Daya Bay development, and the life of the wider Dongjiang region.