About Bao'an Daily

Bao'an Daily

Bao'an Daily (Chinese: 宝安日报; pinyin: Bao'an Ribao) is a Chinese-language daily newspaper published in Shenzhen, Guangdong, by the Shenzhen Press Group, which lists it among its newspapers. Originally launched on 28 October 1949 as the Bao'an Farmers' Post, it was the first newspaper published in the Shenzhen area after the founding of the People's Republic of China. It serves Bao'an District, the large industrial district covering Shenzhen's northwest and its international airport, as the district party committee's paper within the municipal group. It covers district government, manufacturing and technology employers, community and livelihood news for Bao'an's several million residents, complementing the group's citywide titles with district-level reporting.

The first newspaper of the Shenzhen area

The paper's predecessor, the Bao'an Farmers' Post (宝安农民报), was inaugurated on 28 October 1949, days after the founding of the People's Republic, as the organ newspaper of the Bao'an Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Reference histories describe it as the first newspaper in the whole of Shenzhen after the founding of the PRC — a notable distinction, given that the territory it served was then Bao'an County, a largely rural county on the Hong Kong border, and that the city of Shenzhen did not yet exist. The paper began, as its name declared, as a newspaper for farmers, the county party committee's channel to a countryside of villages and market towns.

Renamings of the 1950s

The young paper's name changed with the fashions of the decade. On 24 October 1956 the Bao'an Farmers' Post was renamed the Bao'an Post (宝安报). On 1 January 1959 it was renamed the Bao'an Daily, taking the name it carries today; on 1 July 1959 it was renamed back to the Bao'an Post. The sequence — farmers' paper, county paper, daily, county paper again — reflects the unsettled state of China's county-level press in the 1950s, when titles were repeatedly adjusted to administrative campaigns and to the resources available for daily publication in a poor rural county. Through these changes the title remained what it had been at its founding: the Bao'an party committee's own newspaper.

Suspension and the 1993 relaunch

During the Cultural Revolution the newspaper was suspended, as were most of China's local papers, and its absence lasted far beyond that decade. Publication resumed only on 1 July 1993 — a relaunch that coincided with the transformation of its territory. Bao'an County had been abolished in the creation of Shenzhen: the county was renamed Shenzhen City in 1979 and became the core of the special economic zone, and Bao'an itself was re-established as a district of Shenzhen on 1 January 1993. The revived paper was thus, from its relaunch, a district newspaper of a booming metropolis rather than a county farmers' paper — though it kept the name and the institutional lineage of 1949. After the relaunch it was the organ newspaper of the Bao'an District Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

Into the Shenzhen Press Group

In September 2004 the paper was merged into the Shenzhen Press Group, the municipal group formed in 2002 from the city's established press organisations and publisher of the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, the Shenzhen Evening News, the Shenzhen Business Daily, Crystal News and other titles. The merger placed the district paper inside the citywide group while preserving its district role: within the group, Bao'an Daily is the title assigned to one territory — the northwest of Shenzhen — in the way the group's other papers are assigned to the whole city or to particular reader segments. The paper publishes online through its own site and through the group's Shenzhen News Network presence.

Bao'an, the district it serves

Bao'an District occupies the northwest of Shenzhen and is one of the city's great industrial territories — historically the part of the county left outside the original special economic zone line, developed as a vast manufacturing base of electronics and other factories, and home to Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport, the city's aerial gateway. The district's population runs to several million, many of them workers and families drawn from across China. Since the district's establishment in 1993 its boundaries have been redrawn as Shenzhen has grown — Guangming and Longhua were separated from Bao'an as new districts in 2007 and 2011, with Longhua becoming a full district in 2016 — but Bao'an remains a demographic and industrial heavyweight within the city, described in Shenzhen's own English-language reporting as the geographical centre of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area and as an economic powerhouse of the city.

A grassroots party paper in practice

An academic case study of the paper, published as a research postprint in 2023, examined how Bao'an Daily practised media-convergence reporting during Shenzhen's campaign for the National Civilized City title, whose evaluation period fell in 2017. The study describes the paper working in its dual capacity as an official party newspaper and a community newspaper: mobilising coverage around the district's campaign, launching special columns and public-welfare publicity, and running a "Citizen Civilization Observation Group" through which residents participated in reporting on the state of their neighbourhoods. Its "Supervision Post" column reported, for example, on an illegal excavation that had turned a pipeline construction site on Xinghua Second Road into a rubbish pit blocking the pavement; the report drew two written instructions from the then district party secretary, and a follow-up report recorded the road restored to traffic and the construction unit's responsible person detained. The case is a documented instance of the paper's everyday method: district-level supervision reporting, conducted inside the party system, aimed at getting specific local problems fixed.

Coverage and role

The paper's brief covers district government and policy as they reach residents, the manufacturing and technology employers who dominate Bao'an's economy, and community and livelihood news — schools, housing, transport, services and neighbourhood affairs — for the district's population. Shenzhen's English-language Shenzhen Daily regularly credits Bao'an Daily as the source for district news, from Bao'an's rankings in national indices of district competitiveness and cultural-industry strength to its figures for airport traffic and industrial output: the district paper functions as the record of first instance for Bao'an, from which the city's other media draw. That is the classic position of a Chinese district party paper, adapted to one of the largest and richest districts in the country.

Assessment

Bao'an Daily has the longest lineage of any newspaper in Shenzhen: founded in 1949 as a farmers' paper for a rural border county, renamed through the 1950s, suspended in the Cultural Revolution, relaunched in 1993 on the day-to-day foundation of the new district system, and absorbed into the municipal press group in 2004. Its history runs in parallel with that of its territory — from Bao'an County, which once included the land of both Shenzhen and Hong Kong, to a single industrial district of a global technology city. As the district party committee's paper within the Shenzhen Press Group, it remains the documentary voice of Bao'an, and its survival from the county-press era into the converged-media present makes it a singular thread in the press history of the Pearl River Delta.

The paper's recorded web addresses — baoandaily.com and its page within the group's Shenzhen News Network — mark the final stage of that long adaptation: the county farmers' paper of 1949 now reaches most of its readers as a district news service inside a metropolitan digital network, while continuing in print as the Bao'an party committee's title within the Shenzhen Press Group.