About Shantou Television

Shantou Television

Shantou Television is the city broadcaster of Shantou, the port city of eastern Guangdong at the heart of the Chaoshan region. Operated from the Shantou Radio and Television Center, it is described in channel references as the largest television station in eastern Guangdong, with a scale and technical equipment in the forefront of China's municipal television stations. Founded in 1983, Shantou Television runs eight channels and broadcasts news and local programming in Mandarin and the Teochew dialect across Shantou, Chaozhou and Jieyang, reaching into southeastern Fujian and Shenzhen — a footprint that follows the geography of Chaoshan culture and its worldwide diaspora.

Foundation and growth

Shantou Television was founded in 1983, during the first wave of city television expansion that followed China's reform and opening up. Shantou had been made a Special Economic Zone at the start of that decade, and the new station grew with the revived port city. Its original service was an early news station carried on Channel 33, the predecessor of today's News Integrated Channel. Over the following decades the single channel developed into a multi-channel broadcaster centred on the Shantou Radio and Television Center, which channel references describe as the largest television station in east Guangdong, its scale and technical equipment ranking in the forefront of national municipal television stations — a striking position for a prefecture-level city station, and one explained by Shantou's role as the media centre for the whole Chaoshan region rather than for its own municipal area alone.

An eight-channel broadcaster

Shantou Television operates eight sets of channels: the News Integrated Channel, the Economic Life Channel, the Film and TV Literature Channel, the Information Channel, the Digital TV Guide Video Channel, and the Chenghai Channel, Chaoyang Channel and Chaonan Channel. The first five channels are run directly by the headquarters, while the last three serve the Chenghai, Chaoyang and Chaonan districts of the city, giving large districts of Shantou their own local television voices within the municipal broadcaster. This structure — a regional centre with district-level channels beneath it — reflects Shantou's administrative shape after its expansion to administer a wide coastal territory, and it makes Shantou Television effectively a small network rather than a single-station operation.

The News Integrated Channel

The flagship News Integrated Channel was founded with the station in 1983 and descends from the early Channel 33 news service. In 2011 it moved to broadcasting 24 hours a day. Its main programmes include Shantou News, the station's principal news bulletin, and Shantou Police Watch, a public-security programme of the kind that Chinese city stations use to combine crime reporting, police publicity and public-safety advice. The channel's coverage extends across Shantou and most areas of Chaozhou City and Jieyang City, parts of southeastern Fujian Province and Shenzhen City — an audience area that maps closely onto the Chaoshan cultural region and the places to which its people have moved within China.

Economic life and Teochew culture

The Economic Life Channel, the station's second service, also dates to the station's founding in 1983. Its best-known programme is Today's Vision, a flagship strand joined by life-service programmes such as Life Help and health programming including Health Care Has a Way. In 2012 the channel added a newscast-style talk show, Double Talk, whose ratings rose to rival Today's Vision itself. The channel's cultural programming includes Chaoshan Wind, introducing Chaoshan customs and traditions, whose overseas version, Chaoyun, was made so that Teochew people around the world could feel the beauty of their hometown. Few programmes better express the mission of Shantou Television: the Chaoshan diaspora, formed by generations of emigration from Shantou's port to Southeast Asia and beyond, remains emotionally and economically connected to the region, and its television service consciously speaks to that worldwide audience as well as to viewers at home.

Film, drama and district channels

The Film and TV Literature Channel, the station's third service, plays television dramas and literary and arts programmes, providing the entertainment backbone of the portfolio. The Information Channel and the Digital TV Guide Video Channel complete the headquarters-run services. Below them, the Chenghai, Chaoyang and Chaonan channels serve three populous districts, each with its own strong local identity within greater Shantou. Chenghai is known for its toy-manufacturing industry, Chaoyang and Chaonan for their dense towns and overseas connections; district channels allow the broadcaster to carry town-level news and announcements that a single citywide service could not accommodate, and they institutionalise the idea that in Shantou, local means not only the city but the district and the hometown township.

The Chaoshan context

Shantou Television cannot be understood apart from Chaoshan, the cultural-linguistic region of eastern Guangdong comprising Shantou, Chaozhou and Jieyang. The region's predominant language is Teochew, a variety of Southern Min quite distinct from the Cantonese spoken in the Pearl River Delta, and its people maintain a strong regional identity expressed through cuisine, tea culture, opera and a famous entrepreneurial tradition. The clean listing for the station records that it broadcasts in Mandarin and the Teochew dialect; in practice, a broadcaster serving Chaoshan must move constantly between the national language and the language of home, and Shantou Television's cultural strands exist precisely to document and celebrate the Teochew-speaking world. Its coverage area — the three Chaoshan cities, the neighbouring Minnan-speaking corner of Fujian and Shenzhen, where many Chaoshan people now work — is the map of that world drawn by television.

Shantou on the regional stage

The station's standing in the profession is reflected in its participation in national media gatherings in the city: when the International Television Festival was held in China for the first time at Shantou University in May 2004, with more than 200 international electronic-media professionals taking part, Shantou TV stood alongside Dragon TV, Guangdong Television, Southern Television and Shenzhen TV among the participating broadcasters, and its journalists joined discussions on investigative reporting and the future of Chinese television. For the largest station in eastern Guangdong, such occasions confirm a role that goes beyond municipal broadcasting: Shantou Television is the region's representative in the national broadcasting conversation.

The station and the port city it serves

Shantou's modern history explains the audience its broadcaster serves. The city, known in the local dialect as Swatow, is a coastal Special Economic Zone in Guangdong, and travel and regional references describe how its people speak both Teochew and Mandarin in daily life, with Cantonese widely understood as a third language through the influence of Guangdong media. Standard Mandarin is the main language of official broadcast media, while Teochew remains the language of home and street. A broadcaster in such a city works permanently between languages: national bulletins and formal programming in Mandarin, community and cultural programming rooted in Teochew. Shantou Television's structure — a strong central newsroom, life-service channels and district services reaching across the Chaoshan plain — is built for exactly that bilingual, hometown-centred audience, at home and throughout the diaspora.

Significance

Four decades after its founding in 1983, Shantou Television remains the defining broadcaster of the Chaoshan region: eight channels strong, technically ranked among China's leading municipal stations, and editorially rooted in Teochew language and culture. Its 24-hour news channel, its district services and its diaspora-facing cultural programmes together show how a city station in China can serve simultaneously as a municipal newsroom, a regional network and a cultural bridge to a worldwide hometown community. In a province whose television map is dominated by Guangzhou and Shenzhen, Shantou Television is proof that the east of Guangdong has a powerful media voice of its own.