About Diqing Daily

Diqing Daily

Diqing Daily (迪庆日报, Diqing Ribao) is the newspaper of Shangri-La, seat of the Diqing Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in northwestern Yunnan, China. Published by the Diqing Daily Press directly under the Diqing Prefectural Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, whose official organ it is, the paper appears in Chinese and in Tibetan — the two principal languages of a high plateau prefecture where Tibetans form about a third of the population and more than twenty other ethnic groups make up most of the rest. It is one of the youngest prefecture party newspapers in Yunnan: the prefecture waited more than three decades after its founding before its economy could support a paper of its own.

A prefecture long without a newspaper

Diqing was established as a Tibetan autonomous prefecture in 1957 — its sixtieth anniversary was marked in 2017 — but, as the paper's own institutional histories record, the prefecture's slow economic development meant its party committee did not immediately create a newspaper. For decades Diqing's readers relied on provincial and national titles produced far away in Kunming or Beijing. Only in the late 1980s, as roads, tourism and prefectural revenues grew, did a local party paper become viable on the plateau, at an altitude above 3,000 metres where distribution alone is a logistical undertaking.

Trial issue in 1988 and formal founding in 1989

The paper's predecessor, Diqing Bao, published a trial issue in October 1988. In April 1989 it was formally founded and began issuing a Chinese-language newspaper — the founding date recorded for Diqing Daily in the Yunnan provincial newspaper annals. The young paper served a prefecture of roughly 400,000 people spread over some 23,000 square kilometres of mountains and river gorges where the Jinsha (upper Yangtze), Lancang (Mekong) and Nujiang (Salween) run in parallel, and where its seat, then called Zhongdian, was still a remote county town years away from international fame.

The Tibetan edition and the present name, 1995

On 2 March 1995 the newspaper began publishing a Tibetan-language paper in cooperation with the Diqing Tibetan Studies Institute and other local bodies, and at that point it took its present name, Diqing Daily. Publishing in Tibetan is the paper's defining feature. Diqing's Tibetan readers use the same script as readers in Lhasa, but literacy in Tibetan in the prefecture has historically been lower than in the Tibet Autonomous Region, and the prefecture's population is unusually mixed — about 85 per cent ethnic minority, yet only about a third Tibetan, with Lisu, Naxi, Bai and Yi communities alongside. A prefecture paper in both Chinese and Tibetan is Diqing's institutional answer to that diversity.

A publication number of its own for the Tibetan paper

In 2009 China's General Administration of Press and Publication approved a domestic unified publication number for the Diqing Tibetan newspaper in its own right, and from 2011 the Tibetan paper was formally published under that licence. In May 2011 it was relaunched as a colour broadsheet. A separate licence matters in the Chinese system: it recognises the Tibetan edition not as a translation supplement but as a newspaper in itself, with its own place in the national press registry — a status few prefecture-level minority editions achieve.

What the paper publishes: a 2008 snapshot

An unusually detailed outside record of the paper's content survives in a 2008 United States consular report on Diqing, whose author read Diqing Ribao during a visit to the prefecture and recorded what its pages carried. The paper had reported the prefecture's forest cover rising from 65.4 per cent a decade earlier to 73.9 per cent, the product of a decade of reforestation spending. It published the licence-plate numbers of every taxi and truck in the prefecture receiving fuel subsidies — transparency by list, in print. A front-page story in late June 2008 described party and government cadres visiting a village to explain, in Tibetan, how to identify counterfeit currency, framing the anti-counterfeiting campaign as a matter of social stability. The same summer it reported that Deqin County's tobacco-tax income had risen from 2 million yuan in 2002 to 20 million yuan in 2007, noted a local bank's gift of 900 MP3 players to security personnel stationed in Deqin, and carried a speech by the prefecture military sub-district's political commissar on ethnic unity, stability and development. The consular report called it "the daily newspaper of the Prefecture Communist Party" and noted that a journalist from the paper was part of Deqin's local cultural circle — a working prefecture newsroom, not a mere bulletin.

Serving Shangri-La

The paper's city was renamed underneath it. Zhongdian County, the prefectural seat, was officially renamed Shangri-La in 2001, after the hidden valley of James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon — a name researchers argued derived from the Tibetan dialect of the Zhongdian area, meaning "the moon in one's heart". The rebranding made the prefecture a global tourism name, and the newspaper's beat changed with it: from 1994, when Diqing began promoting tourism, its stories increasingly concerned the scenic economy of Meili Snow Mountain, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Pudacuo National Park and Napa Lake, and institutions such as Ganden Sumtseling Monastery, built in 1679 on the order of the Fifth Dalai Lama and the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Yunnan. The prefecture markets itself as a "kingdom of animals and plants" and a biological gene pool, with more than 5,000 plant species and some 1,400 wild animal species recorded — the ecological beat the paper's reforestation coverage already served. Human settlement here is ancient — the Gedeng Neolithic site in Weixi County attests to habitation some 7,000 years ago — and the prefecture stands on the old Tea-Horse Trail, the southern silk road along which its peoples traded with Tibet and Sichuan for centuries. Hilton's novel reached the screen in 1937 and its theme song carried "Shangri-La" around the world; the newspaper founded half a century later inherited a beat in which a literary myth, a tea-trade crossroads and a living Tibetan culture occupy the same valleys.

Digital presence

Like other Chinese prefecture papers, Diqing Daily has extended beyond print: it maintains a Sina Weibo account and a WeChat official account, through which its Chinese and Tibetan content reaches readers on mobile platforms, and it publishes online through the prefecture's news web presence. Its cultural brief has widened with the prefecture's own: by the sixtieth anniversary in 2017, Diqing had placed nearly 300 forms of intangible cultural heritage on protection lists at county level and above, and was promoting cultural brands from the "Shangri-La Band" to local literature — the living culture its Tibetan and Chinese pages exist to record. For a newspaper whose distribution area includes some of the most mountainous terrain in China — where a bus ride from the prefectural seat to Deqin once took six hours over passes above 4,200 metres — digital delivery is not a supplement but a solution to the geography that delayed the paper's founding in the first place.

Diqing Daily today

Diqing Daily remains what its history made it: a bilingual prefecture party newspaper founded late, in 1989, because its prefecture was poor and remote; given its present name when the Tibetan edition began in 1995; and strengthened in 2011 when that Tibetan edition, relaunched in colour broadsheet format under its own national publication number, confirmed the paper's twin identity. From Shangri-La it records the government, ecology, tourism and ethnic cultures of China's southernmost Tibetan prefecture, in the two languages its readers actually use.