About 21st Century Business Herald

21st Century Business Herald

The 21st Century Business Herald, known in Chinese as 21 Shiji Jingji Baodao and abbreviated as 21CBH, is a Chinese business-news newspaper published in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. It appears five times a week, on weekdays, and has built its reputation on reporting about companies, markets, finance and economic policy. A Santa Clara University faculty page describing the paper called it a Chinese-language international daily headquartered in Guangzhou, with bureaus in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and other major Chinese cities, and noted that many professionals considered it the "Wall Street Journal of China." That comparison captures the place the Herald came to occupy in China's financial press: a market-oriented business paper read by executives, investors and officials who needed detailed economic reporting rather than general news.

Founding by Shen Hao in 2001

The Herald was officially launched by Shen Hao on 1 January 2001, as a weekly newspaper, as part of the Nanfang Daily Media Group. Shen was 30 years old at the time and had just left a senior editorial post at the noted Southern Weekly, according to reporting on his later trial. His founding motto for the new paper was rendered in English as "Let the weak be powerful, let the pessimistic keep moving." Shen had already become a well-known figure in Chinese journalism: he wrote the widely quoted 1999 Southern Weekend New Year's editorial titled "There will always be a power capable of making us weep," a piece celebrating the power of journalism and its readers. The Herald was therefore born inside one of China's most influential southern media families, the Nanfang group based in Guangzhou, but with a distinctly commercial, business-focused identity of its own from the first issue.

From Weekly Newspaper to Weekday Daily

Although it began as a weekly, the Herald grew into a business-news daily published five times a week on weekdays. Its growth mirrored the rapid expansion of China's capital markets, private companies and stock-market investing during the 2000s, which created a large readership for specialised financial journalism. Financial newspaper market research cited by the consulting firm Daxue Consulting ranked the Herald among China's five main financial newspapers, alongside China Business News, the China Business Journal, China Times and The Economic Observer. Academic research on Chinese business media likewise lists the Herald, together with titles such as Caijing and The Economic Observer, among the commercially oriented, nonofficial business publications that focused on corporate and financial news. The same research notes that the Herald was controlled by the Nanfang news group in Guangzhou.

Readership and Circulation

Descriptions of the Herald from the early 2010s give a sense of its scale at its print peak. The Santa Clara University page stated that its circulation exceeded 843,000 copies, and a separate media statistics table reproduced in a University of Hong Kong study listed the 21st Century Business Herald at 859,500 copies. Those figures date from around 2012 to 2013 and should be read as period figures rather than current audited numbers, since Chinese newspapers, like newspapers elsewhere, have since shifted much of their audience online. The Santa Clara description also identified the Herald as the Greater China region partner of Forbes magazine at that time, reflecting the international business connections the Guangzhou paper cultivated during its expansion years.

Sister Publications and the 21st Century Media Family

In the years after its launch, the newspaper spawned several outlets under its umbrella. They included Moneyweek, also rendered as Money Week, a weekly publication focused on money and investment; the 21st Century Business Review; Global Entrepreneur; and the website 21cbh.com. Together these titles formed what became known as the 21st Century media system, operated through Guangdong 21st Century Media Co., Ltd. The print newspaper remained the flagship, while the magazines and website extended the brand into personal finance, management and business-leader coverage. This multi-title structure was typical of ambitious Chinese media groups in the 2000s, which used a successful newspaper as the core of a wider publishing business.

Place Within the Nanfang and Southern Finance Groups

The Herald began as part of the Nanfang Daily Media Group, the Guangzhou-based group built around Southern Daily, the official newspaper of the Guangdong Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. On 17 November 2016 the Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group was established, described as China's first omnimedia group. On that date the Herald was simultaneously affiliated to the new Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group, together with related print media outlets, websites, radio and television outlets and social media outlets. The move placed the newspaper inside a finance-focused converged media organisation, combining print, broadcasting and digital operations under one structure, and marked a formal shift from a newspaper-led model to an all-media model.

Digital Presence

The Herald's digital history runs through two addresses listed for the paper: 21cbh.com, its original official website, and epaper.21jingji.com, its electronic paper edition. The 21jingji brand, taken from the Chinese name of the newspaper, became the centre of its online financial news operation. The paper's own account of its digital transformation describes a multimedia ecosystem spanning websites, mobile applications and major social platforms, along with data products aimed at investors, enterprises and policy readers. As with most large Chinese business newspapers, the balance of the Herald's work has moved steadily from the printed weekday edition toward continuous online publishing, short video and social distribution, while the print title remains the brand's flagship and its mark of record.

The 2014 Extortion Investigation

In September 2014 executives from the 21st Century Business Herald were arrested by Shanghai police, who said they were suspected of extortion. Chinese officials said 21cbh.com also had irregularities such as not separating editorial and business operations. People's Daily Online reported in April 2015 that about 30 suspects, including Shen Hao, former president of 21st Century Media Ltd., had been arrested and placed under criminal investigation for forced transactions, blackmail, breach of duty and accepting bribes. Reporting on the court case stated that between August 2009 and September 2014, 21st Century Media and Shen coerced nine companies and organisations, including Sichuan Langjiu Group, into paying more than 7.28 million yuan to cancel negative coverage, capitalising on the fear of negative publicity among companies preparing for initial public offerings.

Closure Orders, Sentencing and Rectification

In April 2015 the official website of the Herald, 21cbh.com, was ordered by China's media regulator to cease operation because of news blackmail. The publishing licence of Moneyweek was revoked, and the newspaper itself was ordered to rectify. The State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television said the website and weekly, along with the Herald newspaper, had irregular management practices, and that the Herald was ordered to conduct internal inspections and restructure its management board. Affected by the incident, Global Entrepreneur officially ceased publication in April 2015. In December 2015 Shen Hao was sentenced by the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court to four years in prison and fined 60,000 yuan for extortion, forced transactions and embezzlement, while Guangdong 21st Century Media Co., Ltd. was fined 9,485,000 yuan for forced trading. Other executives, including Liu Dong, former president of 21cbh.com, and Liu Hui, former editor-in-chief of the Herald, also received prison sentences.

Coverage and Editorial Focus

The Herald's reporting concentrates on the subjects its title promises: business and the economy. Its journalists cover listed companies, initial public offerings, financial institutions, property, industry and macroeconomic policy, and its reporting is frequently cited by international media. The Wall Street Journal, for example, cited the Herald in its February 2021 reporting on China's economy and demographics. Researchers studying the informational role of Chinese newspapers have used the Herald as a leading example of the commercially oriented business press that emerged in the early 2000s, distinguishing it from official Party newspapers by its focus on corporate and financial news and its relative lack of political rhetoric. That market-facing orientation explains both its rapid rise and the commercial pressures that later produced the extortion scandal.

Significance in Chinese Business Journalism

The 21st Century Business Herald occupies a distinctive place in the history of Chinese media. Founded on the first day of 2001, it embodied the optimism of a generation of journalists who believed market-oriented reporting could thrive inside China's state-owned media groups. Within a few years it had grown from a weekly into one of the country's five main financial newspapers, spawned magazines and a major website, and earned comparisons with the Wall Street Journal. Its 2014 and 2015 disgrace, in which its founder and senior executives were jailed for using negative coverage as leverage, became one of the most prominent cautionary cases in Chinese journalism about the dangers of mixing editorial and commercial operations. Its transfer in 2016 to the Southern Finance and Economy Omnimedia Group then recast it as a converged financial media brand. Read together, those three chapters — launch, scandal and restructuring — make the Herald both a leading business newspaper and a case study in the transformation of China's commercial press.