About Baoji Daily

Baoji Daily

Baoji Daily (宝鸡日报, Baoji Ribao) is the Chinese-language daily newspaper of Baoji, a prefecture-level city in western Shaanxi Province, China, in the Wei River valley between the Qinling Mountains and the Loess Plateau. It is the official newspaper of the Baoji Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, edited, published and distributed by the Baoji Daily Press. Unusually for a Chinese city paper, the public record about it is institutional rather than anecdotal: the press's own published departmental budgets describe its structure, staff and new-media operations in detail. What those documents show is a mid-sized municipal party newspaper — some seventy establishment staff and thirteen editorial departments — serving a city known worldwide as China's Titanium Valley.

The Baoji Daily Press

The Baoji Daily Press is a public-welfare institution directly affiliated to the Baoji Municipal Party Committee, classified in the Chinese system as a category-two public-welfare institution at county (division) grade. Its 2022 departmental budget, published by the Baoji municipal government, sets out its duties: to implement the party's line on news and public-opinion work; to edit, publish and distribute Baoji Daily; and to manage and operate the press's new-media matrix. At the end of 2021 the press had an authorised establishment of 71 staff, organised in thirteen internal departments together with four independent operating units responsible for its commercial activities such as distribution and advertising.

Thirteen departments: the shape of the newsroom

The departmental structure named in the press's budget documents is a map of the newspaper's contents. Alongside an office and an editorial planning department stand the news desks that fill a Chinese municipal party paper: a current-affairs news department for the municipal leadership and government; a party-building and livelihood department for party affairs and people's daily concerns; an industry-and-economy news department for the city's factories and markets; and a culture and sports department for Baoji's cultural life, heritage and sport — among thirteen departments in all. The 2022 work plan published with the budget states the press's editorial credo in the standard phrases of the Chinese party press: to hold fast to the principle that "the party newspaper bears the party's surname", to run the newspaper as political households run it, and to build the public-opinion atmosphere for Baoji's official development goal of the period — accelerating its construction as a sub-centre city and pathfinder region of the Guanzhong plain.

The new-media matrix

The same documents describe the press's digital operations, which the newspaper's duties formally include: the "Pocket Baoji" mobile app, the Baoji Daily WeChat official account, the Baoji Daily official Weibo account, and the Baoji Net website, maintained and operated by the press as a single new-media matrix alongside the printed paper. The arrangement is the standard converged structure of the contemporary Chinese municipal press — one newsroom, founded on the party daily, publishing to print, web, app and social platforms — and in Baoji's case it is written into the press's chartered functions rather than left as an informal sideline.

The titanium beat

Baoji Daily's defining subject is the industry that made its city a global name. Baoji was selected by state planners in 1964 as China's titanium processing hub, one of the dispersed strategic-industry sites of the Third Front era: a rail-connected Guanzhong valley city flanked by mountains, to which titanium sponge from Sichuan's Panzhihua could be shipped for processing. Its first titanium processing facility, built in a ravine at Maying Town as the country's only specialist producer of titanium materials, was producing titanium alloy parts for the air force by 1968. Today the Baoji Titanium Valley, centred on the Baoti Group and more than 600 titanium enterprises of every size, processes about 60,000 tons of titanium materials a year — roughly 65 per cent of China's output and a third of the world's — supplying aerospace, shipbuilding, chemical plant, power, medical and new-energy industries. The private industry that grew up around the state plant from the 1980s, the biennial titanium expos for which Baoji is the permanent host, and the city's patent output in titanium, the highest of any Chinese cluster, are standing stories in the city paper: Baoji Daily's industry desk covers the material its city supplies to the world.

From secret metal to civilian industry

For its first decades the industry the paper covers was largely invisible. Until the late 1970s most titanium extracted and processed in China was for classified military uses, and Baoji's plant worked behind the discretion of the Third Front. Civilian applications emerged slowly through the 1980s and 1990s, when chemical companies discovered that titanium equipment, with a design life of thirty years, outlasted carbon steel measured in months. Private enterprise followed the state plant's technicians into the market: in the industry's initial period, from 1984 to 1995, Baoji's private titanium firms numbered first a handful and then more than thirty, growing from fewer than 500 employees and some 20 million yuan of output to nearly 1,000 employees and about 100 million yuan, and in 1997 a private Baoji firm commissioned the sector's first private titanium tube production line. The city paper's business pages chronicled that transition firm by firm, as equipment-making workshops with a hammer and a welding torch matured into specialised manufacturers.

The exposition city

Baoji's titanium standing is ceremonial as well as industrial: the city is the permanent venue of China's most professional and largest titanium exposition, and industry accounts credit its producers with the overwhelming share of the domestic high-end titanium market, built on more than 6,000 trial-production tasks undertaken for national defence and advanced technology programmes over four decades of reform. The cluster's patent applications have grown at about ten per cent a year for long stretches, ranking first among China's titanium centres. Each exposition, each record ingot and each new alloy line is front-page material for the city whose name the industry carries — "Baoji Titanium" is a brand the newspaper and the metal share.

The older Baoji: bronze, temples and the Wei River

The newspaper's culture pages rest on deeper strata. Baoji stands in the western Guanzhong plain on the Wei River, a heartland of the Zhou dynasty and one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation; Shaanxi's own provincial accounts list the Famen Temple in Baoji among the province's signature heritage sites — the Tang-dynasty temple famed for its relic of the Buddha's finger bone — alongside Xi'an's Terracotta Warriors and Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. The city's equipment-manufacturing base, built in the planned-economy decades along the Longhai railway, and its position at the foot of the Qinling range, the watershed between north and south China, complete the standing agenda the paper's thirteen departments divide among themselves.

Baoji Daily today

Baoji Daily remains the Baoji municipal party committee's newspaper, published by a press whose own published accounts give it a precise institutional portrait: directly subordinate to the municipal committee, seventy-one establishment posts, thirteen departments, four operating units, and a chartered new-media matrix of app, WeChat, Weibo and news site. In print and online it records the government, industry and culture of the Titanium Valley — a city whose ancient Zhou bronzes and modern titanium alloys give its party paper an unusually material sense of what a city's news is made of.