About Weifang Daily

Weifang Daily

Weifang Daily (潍坊日报, Weifang Ribao) is the Chinese-language daily newspaper of Weifang, a prefecture-level city in central Shandong province, China. It is the official newspaper — the party paper — of the Weifang Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and it was formally launched on 1 July 1984, after the former Weifang prefecture was reconstituted as a prefecture-level city. The paper's founding is unusually well documented: in November 2025 its own pages carried a series of memoirs by its founding editors, recording in detail how the paper was created from nothing — no building, no printing plant, a staff of about twenty — and how it grew into a press house of nearly three hundred people with its own rotary presses and office tower. Weifang Daily remains the city's daily of record and the flagship of Weifang's official media on the Weifang news portal.

A city gets its party paper, 1983–1984

In 1983 the administrative reorganisation of Shandong converted Weifang prefecture into the prefecture-level city of Weifang, and the new municipal party committee decided to found its own organ newspaper. The task fell to Li Sixue, then executive deputy director of the municipal committee's publicity department, who later recalled that newspaper work was entirely new to him when, on 13 June 1984, the municipal committee issued the document appointing the paper's first leadership team, with Li himself as party secretary and editor-in-chief. The founding team set out the paper's editorial creed at the start: as a party organ it was to serve as the voice of the municipal committee and to reflect the voice of the people, and to treat truthfulness as the lifeline of the paper. Staff were recruited from across the city, and the paper began life without premises of its own — the municipal committee arranged for it to borrow the old offices vacated by the city machinery bureau on what is now Weizhou Road, and the mayor personally approved its start-up funds.

Trial issues and the launch of 1 July 1984

The founders learned the trade as they went. Li Sixue sent three deputy editors with more than ten editors and reporters to study at the provincial paper Dazhong Daily and at Jinan Daily, bringing back working knowledge of news-gathering, editing and page design. The calligrapher Shu Tong — the celebrated calligrapher who had served as party secretary of Shandong — was invited to write the paper's masthead, whose generous, well-formed characters won the young paper immediate praise. Trial issues were produced in June 1984; a trial number was shown during the city's sixth party congress, where more than six hundred delegates read it and responded warmly, greatly strengthening the team's confidence. After further trial numbers and a review of lessons learned, the date for the formal launch was fixed as 1 July 1984 — the sixty-third anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The first issues were printed for the paper by the Xinhua printing factory in hot-metal composition, and the initial print run was about twenty thousand copies an issue.

Building a printing plant: from lead and fire to light and electricity

For its first five years Weifang Daily had no press of its own; its pages were set and printed by an outside factory, an arrangement its editors found slow and restrictive. In 1988 the paper's leadership resolved to build its own printing plant. From the spring of 1989 the staff split into teams to raise funds, choose equipment, find premises and recruit workers. The plant was improvised in a damp, dilapidated two-storey warehouse rented from the Xinhua Bookstore, but the equipment chosen was ambitious: two Beijing-built JJ204 rotary offset presses, and — after studying what brother newspapers were doing — a Huaguang laser typesetting system, so that the paper leapt in one step from the era of "lead and fire" to the era of "light and electricity", placing its printing, by its editors' account, in the front rank of China's newspaper printing industry. After six hard months of construction and installation, five years of dependence on outside printers ended. The plant moved with the paper to its new site in the 1990s and was repeatedly upgraded, with new presses installed and commissioned at the end of the decade to sharpen the timeliness of the paper's printing and distribution.

A home of its own: the Wenhua Road building

The paper's second great construction project was its headquarters. Site selection dragged through six or seven candidate plots — prices too high, locations unsuitable — before land south of the Zaichun Garden area was settled on. On 8 May 1992 the groundbreaking ceremony for the Weifang Daily Press office building was held, attended by the leaders of the city's four leading bodies. Construction took about two years, financed by a municipal appropriation supplemented by funds the staff themselves helped raise. In February 1995 the paper's cadres and workers moved from the old borrowed offices on Weizhou Road into the new building at 500 Wenhua Road, an event its then editor-in-chief Cui Naiyuan recorded with the words that the press finally had a home of its own. By the paper's tenth anniversary its staff had grown from the twenty-odd people of the founding to nearly three hundred, including journalists, editors and a commercial workforce built up to sustain the paper's operations.

The party paper in the converged era

Weifang Daily continues as the Weifang municipal committee's organ, carrying the city's official announcements, policy interpretation and development reporting, and its editions are carried on Weifang's official news portal alongside the city's other official media. In November 2025 the paper marked its heritage by publishing the multi-part memoir series "Weifang Daily in the pens of old newspapermen", in which its founding generation — Li Sixue on the founding, Cui Naiyuan on the building and the printing plant, colleagues on the plant's relocations and technical upgrades — set down the institutional memory of the paper's first decades. The series is a reminder that in China the city party newspaper is a permanent institution of local government: the same masthead, in Shu Tong's calligraphy, has headed the city's official record since 1984.

Coverage: the kite capital

Weifang is known throughout China and abroad as the kite capital of the world: it is the headquarters of the International Kite Federation, celebrates an annual international kite festival that began, like the newspaper itself, in 1984, and counts kite-making among its signature folk crafts, alongside Yangjiabu woodblock New Year paintings. These are standing subjects of Weifang Daily's culture and city-life coverage — festival reporting, craft heritage, and the tourism economy the festival sustains. The coincidence of dates is a neat emblem of the paper's role: the Daily was founded in the same year that modern Weifang began presenting itself to the world through the kite festival, and it has chronicled that self-presentation ever since.

Coverage: agriculture and the Shouguang model

The prefecture the paper serves is one of China's great agricultural regions, and agricultural modernisation is a core beat. Weifang administers Shouguang, the county-level city famous across China as a vegetable capital whose wholesale markets and greenhouse production supply cities nationwide, and the wider prefecture is a centre of food processing and agricultural machinery. Weifang Daily's rural and economy pages report on seed, greenhouse technology, produce markets and the incomes of farm households, as well as on the prefecture's celebrated experiments in agricultural industrialisation that drew national attention in the reform era. For a party paper whose readership includes the county and township cadres who run this agricultural economy, such coverage is both news and working information.

Coverage: manufacturing and city development

Modern Weifang is also an industrial city, home to enterprises of world scale such as the diesel-engine and powertrain maker Weichai Group and the acoustic-components manufacturer Goertek, both singled out in accounts of outside delegations touring the city's economy. Weifang Daily's development reporting follows these firms and the city's wider manufacturing base, its port and transport links on the Shandong peninsula, and the urban construction of a prefecture of more than nine million people spread across four districts, six county-level cities and two counties. As the municipal organ, the paper publishes the city's plans and reports their execution; as the city's oldest continuous news institution, it holds the archive of Weifang's transformation from a handicraft and trading town — the "north Suzhou" of the Qing dynasty, in the period phrase — into a modern industrial prefecture.

Place in the Shandong party press

Within Shandong's party press system, Weifang Daily is the organ of one of the province's largest prefectures, junior to the provincial Dazhong Daily — at whose offices its founders trained — and senior to the county papers beneath it. Its history, preserved in its founders' own published memoirs, documents the practical reality behind the standard form of the Chinese city party paper: the borrowed offices, the borrowed printing plant, the masthead solicited from a famous calligrapher, and the decade-long effort to build a self-sustaining press house. That record, together with forty years of continuous publication, makes Weifang Daily an unusually well-evidenced example of its type, and the authoritative daily record of Weifang city.