About Asahi Shimbun Chinese

Asahi Shimbun Chinese

Overview

Asahi Shimbun Chinese, known in Chinese as 朝日新闻中文网, was the Chinese-language online edition of The Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's oldest and largest newspapers. It was launched on 16 April 2012 as a free website on asahi.com, alongside the parent paper's Japanese digital edition and its English-language AJW edition. The Chinese edition translated and presented Asahi journalism for readers who read Chinese rather than Japanese or English, at a moment when several major Japanese news organisations were building Chinese-language websites to reach readers in China and across the wider Chinese-reading world. The edition is now historical. The Asahi Shimbun's current web editions are its Japanese site and the English AJW service, so this profile is written in the past tense for the Chinese service itself, while describing the parent newspaper, which continues to publish, in the present tense where appropriate.

The Chinese edition mattered less for its longevity than for what it represented. It was an attempt by a Japanese newspaper of record, founded in the nineteenth century and long accustomed to addressing a domestic audience, to speak directly to Chinese readers in their own language, without mediation by wire copy or by other outlets. That experiment collided quickly with the politics of Japan-China relations, most visibly in July 2013, when all four of the Asahi's social media accounts in China were deleted at a time of acute tension over the Diaoyu islands, known in Japan as the Senkaku islands.

The parent newspaper

The Asahi Shimbun was founded on 25 January 1879 and is headquartered in Nakanoshima, Osaka, with a major Tokyo head office. Its name literally means "morning sun newspaper." It is considered a Japanese newspaper of record and is counted among Japan's five national newspapers, alongside the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Mainichi Shimbun, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, known as Nikkei, and the Chunichi Shimbun. For much of the modern era it was the second-largest newspaper in the world by print circulation, behind only the Yomiuri. Its morning-edition circulation was recorded at about 3.26 million in June 2025, a figure that reflects both the paper's continuing scale and the long, industry-wide decline of print circulation in Japan from historic highs of nearly eight million in 2010.

The parent company's history shaped the resources behind the Chinese edition. The Asahi Shimbun Company is a privately held media group whose ownership has remained associated with the founding Murayama and Ueno families. It publishes a morning and an evening edition in Japan, operates the asahi.com digital platform, and has long maintained foreign bureaus, prizes and cultural activities, including the Asahi Prize, established in 1929 and awarded since 1992 by the Asahi Shimbun Foundation for achievements in scholarship and the arts. A Chinese-language website was, in that context, a modest digital extension of a very large, established newsroom, not a stand-alone start-up.

Why Japanese newspapers built Chinese websites

The Asahi did not act alone. A July 2012 bulletin of the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association, known as NSK, surveyed a wave of Japanese newspapers and news agencies opening websites in Chinese and Korean, and placed the Asahi launch inside that wave. Kyodo News, Japan's cooperative news agency, had been a leader, hosting a Chinese-language news website from 2001 and following it with a Korean-language site in 2011. The Nikkei opened its Chinese news website on 15 March 2012, offering Chinese translations of articles and columns drawn from its Japanese-language daily. The Asahi followed a month later. The pattern is instructive: Japanese publishers saw a large, fast-growing Chinese-reading internet audience, strong foreign demand for information about Japan, and a chance to build a direct relationship with readers who might later take up paid services.

For the Asahi specifically, the NSK bulletin recorded the commercial logic plainly. The Chinese site, and the Korean site that followed, were offered to the public free of charge, and Asahi officials said they expected the sites to raise the number of subscribers to the company's fee-based online services. The Chinese edition was therefore both an editorial outreach project and a funnel: free translated journalism at the front, intended to demonstrate the value of the Asahi's reporting to a new language market, with paid digital products behind it.

Launch in April 2012

The Chinese-language news website opened on 16 April 2012. Weeks later, on 14 May 2012, the Asahi began its Korean-language website, titled the Asahi Asia Antenna. The pairing of the two launches shows the regional ambition of the project: within a single spring, the paper added free web editions addressed to readers in the two large neighbouring countries with which Japan's modern history is most closely intertwined. The Chinese edition was presented on asahi.com alongside the Japanese digital edition and the English-language AJW edition, giving the domain a three-language front door in 2012 that it no longer presents in the same form.

The timing was commercially logical and politically exposed. In 2012, Japan-China relations were deteriorating over the East China Sea island dispute, and Japanese brands and media operating in China were operating in a hardening environment. A free Chinese news site depended for its mainland reach not only on its own domain but also on Chinese social platforms, where followings could be built quickly and removed just as quickly. That dependence became the central episode in the Chinese edition's short public history.

Content and readership

The Chinese edition's core content was Asahi journalism rendered in Chinese: news and features drawn from the parent paper's reporting on Japan, on Asia and on the world, selected and translated for Chinese readers. It belonged to the same family of products as the English AJW edition, which selected Asahi reporting for an international audience, except that its language choice gave it a specific strategic meaning. English editions address the world in general; a Chinese edition addresses China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the global Chinese diaspora in particular, including readers with a direct interest in how Japan's newspaper of record covered Japan-China relations, the Japanese economy, technology, society and culture.

No separate audited circulation figure for the Chinese website survives in the sources for this profile, and none is claimed here. The one audience number that is firmly documented belongs to its social distribution: by July 2013, the Asahi's main account on Sina Weibo, China's dominant microblogging service at the time, had gathered about 1.3 million followers. That figure, reported by Agence France-Presse, indicates that within roughly fifteen months of launch the Asahi's Chinese-language presence had built a mainland social audience of a size that most foreign newspapers would have regarded as a significant asset, which is precisely why its sudden deletion drew international attention.

The July 2013 social media deletion

In July 2013, the Asahi Shimbun's head office said that all four of its microblogging accounts in China had been shut down in what it described as an "abnormal situation." Users of Sina Weibo noticed that the newspaper's account had disappeared on the Wednesday of that week, after having gathered around 1.3 million followers. It was not clear what services the other accounts were on, and Sina, which ran Weibo, was not immediately available for comment. The Asahi said it would be "really regrettable if the accounts had been closed intentionally despite the large number of followers" and strongly requested that the operators reopen the accounts as soon as possible.

A former social media editor for the newspaper, posting under the name Wangzuo Zhongyou, wrote that the accounts were taken down because of "instructions from above," without giving details. AFP's reporting, carried by Phys.org and The Hindu BusinessLine, placed the deletion in its contemporary context: Beijing had previously blocked the websites of foreign media organisations, including The New York Times and Bloomberg, after they published reports on topics deemed sensitive by the ruling Communist Party, and China and Japan had for decades disputed ownership of the islands known as Diaoyu in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese. The episode did not by itself prove the reason for the deletions, and this profile does not claim a documented official explanation where none was published. It does show the structural vulnerability of the Chinese edition's model: distribution inside mainland China ran through platforms subject to decisions the publisher could neither predict nor appeal in public.

Place among Japanese foreign-language editions

Viewed comparatively, the Asahi's Chinese experiment sat between two more durable models. Kyodo's Chinese service, begun in 2001, was a wire service product, supplying Chinese-language content to media organisations and portals as well as to the public, a business-to-business logic that did not depend solely on building a consumer brand in China. Nikkei Chinese, launched in March 2012 at cn.nikkei.com, was built around business and economic news for executives, officials and students, and continued as a distinct Chinese-language news website. The Asahi's edition was a general newspaper's consumer-facing translation site, closer in spirit to its own AJW English edition. When the Asahi's web presence later consolidated around the Japanese site and AJW, it was the general consumer editions in Asian languages that disappeared from the line-up, while the English edition, addressed to the global professional audience Japanese publishers most consistently serve, remained.

Closure and current status

The Asahi Shimbun's current web editions, as recorded in reference listings for the newspaper, are its Japanese site at asahi.com and the English AJW edition at asahi.com/ajw. The Chinese edition is not listed among them, and the Korean Asahi Asia Antenna likewise does not form part of the paper's current public line-up. The Chinese service should therefore be understood as a closed, historical outlet: a real, dated and documented attempt, lasting from its April 2012 launch through at least the period of its large Weibo presence in 2013, to publish Asahi journalism directly in Chinese. No closure date is asserted here beyond what the sources support, namely that the edition is no longer among the paper's current web editions.

That restraint matters for the historical record. Foreign-language editions are often launched with press releases and closed without them, leaving the launch well documented and the end date obscure. The verifiable facts are the launch, the free-access model and its stated purpose, the scale of the social audience it built, the July 2013 deletion of its China social accounts, and its absence from the Asahi's present-day editions.

Significance

Asahi Shimbun Chinese is a compact case study in the limits of media soft power. A newspaper with one of the largest print circulations in the world, a 133-year history at the time of launch, and a professional translation operation could build a million-follower audience in China in little more than a year, and could lose its social distribution there in a single week, without a published explanation. Its story also documents a specific moment, the spring of 2012, when Japan's leading news organisations simultaneously concluded that the future required speaking to Chinese readers directly, in Chinese, on the open web. Some of those bets endured in specialised forms, notably in business news and wire services. The Asahi's general-interest Chinese edition did not, and its record, launch, audience, setback and disappearance, is preserved here as part of the history of Japanese journalism's engagement with China.