About Bayannur News Net

Bayannur News Net

Bayannur News Net is the official online news portal serving Bayannur, a prefecture-level city in western Inner Mongolia, China. Published in Chinese, it carries local government, economy, society, livelihood and culture news for Bayannur and its subordinate district, counties and banners, and it is the city's dedicated local news website, produced by Bayannur's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting group. It is distinct from the print Bayannur Daily newspaper, whose reporting it carries alongside online-first local coverage and local government service information.

The prefecture behind the portal is the Hetao plain: the great irrigated farming bowl inside the Yellow River's northern bend, where canals turn desert-edge land into one of China's granaries. Bayannur — Bayan Nur, or Bayannao'er in Chinese — means "rich lake" in Mongolian. Its portal reports on wheat and sunflower fields, border trade, lake ecology and a farming city of about 1.67 million people spread across an area larger than many provinces' farm belts.

The portal and its place in Bayannur media

Bayannur News Net is the web flagship of the city's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting organisation. It publishes the newsroom's reporting continuously online, together with official announcements and government service information, as Bayannur's dedicated local news website and the standing digital record of the prefecture's public affairs.

It is distinct from Bayannur Daily — the group's print newspaper, published alongside the Bayannur Evening News — whose journalism it carries and extends with online-first stories, photography, video and service pages. In China's prefecture-level media structure, newspaper and broadcasting groups have in recent years been merged into converged media centres publishing across print, broadcast, web and mobile channels from a single newsroom, and Bayannur's centre works in that pattern.

The site operates as a licensed internet news information service under the framework administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China. Its newsroom's characteristic beats — irrigation and harvests, seed and melon markets, border ports and grassland banners — are set by the prefecture's unusual double nature: intensive farmland in the south, steppe and desert in the north.

The Hetao plain and the great bend

Bayannur covers an administrative area of about 65,788 square kilometres in western Inner Mongolia, lying between the Hetao Plain and the Urad grassland, with its municipal seat in Linhe District. The Yellow River flows through the city, and the Hetao irrigation area — Asia's largest gravity irrigation area, able to irrigate some 10 million mu, about 0.67 million hectares — turns river water into farmland on a scale rare in northern China.

The city's population was 1,669,915 at the 2010 census, with about 520,300 of them in Linhe District, the city proper. Bayannur is known as the "Frontier Jiangnan" — a Jiangnan, the proverbially fertile south, on the northern frontier — for its fruit and field produce in a dry region. Its name in Mongolian means rich lake, after the lakes scattered across the plain, among them Ulansuhai Nur, one of the region's great freshwater lakes. Geography is destiny in Bayannur's news: water allocations, canal works and lake ecology are front-page subjects.

From league to prefecture city

Bayannur is a young prefecture in an ancient land. Until 1 December 2003 the area was called Bayannur League, the traditional Inner Mongolian league administration; on that date it became a prefecture-level city, with Linhe as its seat. The land's recorded history runs much deeper: the state of Zhao controlled an area including modern Bayannur in the Warring States period, the Western Han dynasty established its administrative structure here, and the Qing dynasty designated the area within its banner system.

The portal's history coverage draws on that depth — Han frontier counties, the irrigation works that successive eras cut from the Yellow River, and the rock paintings of the Yinshan valleys, where nearly 153 cliff painting groups and more than 50,000 individual paintings have been found. Bayan Manduhu in Urad Rear Banner is meanwhile known as a dinosaur kingdom for its fossil finds.

The district, counties and banners it covers

Bayannur administers one district, two counties and four banners: Linhe District, the seat; Wuyuan and Dengkou counties on the plain; and the Urad Front, Urad Middle and Urad Rear banners and Hanggin Rear Banner across the grassland north and west. The prefecture thus runs from dense irrigated townships to herding banners and the Ganqimaodu border port in Urad Middle Banner, facing Mongolia.

The portal's coverage holds that spread together. A sunflower price in Wuyuan, a border-port clearance in Ganqimaodu, a grassland snow warning in Urad Rear Banner and a city service notice in Linhe all belong to the same prefecture service — and for banner readers far from Linhe, the portal is often the most immediate form of the municipal newspaper.

Granary of the north: grain, sunflowers and melons

Agriculture is Bayannur's economy. The Hetao plain is one of China's major grain producing areas, and the city is the largest planting and distribution centre for edible sunflowers in China's western regions: its planting area for sunflowers and other seed kernels exceeds 4 million mu, about a quarter of the national total, and its output accounts for about a third of the national volume. More than 200 local kernel trading enterprises and over 130 processing enterprises handle an annual trade volume of about 1.5 million tons.

Melons, wheat, corn and livestock products complete the farm economy, alongside more than 60 identified mineral varieties in the wider prefecture. The portal's agricultural reporting — sowing and harvest, water releases, seed markets, processing and the kernel industry's foreign trade base — is therefore core economic journalism, read by farmers, traders and processors across the plain.

Border trade and the China-Europe trains

Bayannur's farm produce travels far. The city registered foreign trade worth 31.25 billion yuan in the first three quarters of a recent year, up 28.5 per cent year on year and passing the 30-billion-yuan mark for the first time, with its products exported to more than 100 countries and regions. In January 2022 Bayannur launched its first China-Europe freight train, running to Moscow via the Erenhot port, and by 2023 it had operated a series of outbound trains carrying tens of thousands of tons of cargo.

The Ganqimaodu port in Urad Middle Banner, one of the principal crossings for trade with Mongolia, gives the prefecture a second, northern trade face. The portal covers both: customs and port news for traders, and the customs-technical research base for seed kernel products agreed with the General Administration of Customs — trade infrastructure for the sunflower economy.

Lakes, grassland and ecological coverage

Water made Bayannur rich and keeps it busy. Ulansuhai Nur, the great freshwater lake of the Hetao plain, receives the irrigation system's drainage and supports fisheries and birdlife; its water quality is a long-running ecological story, followed closely in local reporting. The same plain that feeds the lake must manage salinity, drainage and the Yellow River's allocations — permanent themes of the portal's environment coverage.

North of the plain, the banners carry different ecological news: grassland protection, desert control around Dengkou at the edge of the Ulan Buh Desert, and the renewable-energy build-out — the prefecture's plans include 10 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity in Urad Middle and Urad Rear banners. Farming plain, lake, steppe and desert give Bayannur News Net one of the most varied environment briefs of any Inner Mongolian portal.

What the portal publishes

Day to day, Bayannur News Net publishes the full range of a prefecture news service: municipal government and party affairs, policy announcements and official notices; agriculture and water news from the Hetao irrigation system; markets and trade coverage of the kernel, grain and border-port economies; society and livelihood reporting on schools, hospitals and rural services; and culture and tourism news from the rock-painting valleys, the lake and the grassland banners.

It also carries the service information residents and farmers use — recruitment and examination notices, weather and water-release information, road news including services from Bayannur Tianjitai Airport — and extends the converged media centre's newspaper and broadcast reporting with online-first updates through the day. City GDP reached 116.11 billion yuan in 2023, up 7.9 per cent on the previous year, a figure reported and unpacked in the portal's economic coverage.

Digital services, licensing and readership

Like other Chinese prefecture portals, Bayannur News Net operates within the national licensing system for internet news information services, administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which governs which organisations may gather and publish news online. Its authority rests on that licence and on its place inside the official municipal media group.

Its readers are the prefecture's own people — Linhe's urban residents, the farming townships of the Hetao plain, herding families in the Urad banners and the traders of the border port — together with Bayannur people working elsewhere who follow home news online. In that role — noticeboard, newsroom and archive in one — Bayannur News Net is the standing digital record of the rich-lake city on the Yellow River's great bend.