About Beijing Scroll

Beijing Scroll

Beijing Scroll is an English-language Substack newsletter by the Beijing-based journalist Jiang Jiang (姜江), published at beijingscroll.com under the tagline "Explaining the policies, industries and ideas shaping China". The newsletter's own pages list more than 5,000 subscribers, and it organises its coverage into sections spanning society, culture, technology, macro trends and global affairs. Beijing Scroll is the sister publication to Jiang's Ginger River Review, the earlier newsletter through which he brought Chinese-language conversations to an international audience, and between the two titles Jiang has been described in industry reporting as one of the most-followed China writers on Substack. He is a Chinese media professional linked to Xinhua, and his newsletters have become a reference point in the wider debate about Chinese state-media journalists writing directly to international readers on Western platforms — a debate in which Jiang has also lectured, including at Tsinghua University, on how to tell China's story through newsletters.

The author: Jiang Jiang

Jiang Jiang writes Beijing Scroll from Beijing, where he works as a Chinese media professional. A detailed account by a former collaborator, published on the China Translated site, describes him as a Xinhua journalist who founded first Ginger River Review and later Beijing Scroll, and recalls the hesitation with which he allowed his first newsletter to carry a name derived from his own: the collaborator proposed translating Jiang Jiang directly — 姜, ginger; 江, river — and Jiang, still a Xinhua journalist, was afraid for a few days of making the project too personal before giving the name his full blessing. The same account describes how that part-time pet project of passion eventually combined with his main job and became the same thing. Jiang has presented his newsletter work publicly, including a two-hour lecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing, delivered jointly with the university's Center for Strategic and Security Studies, on "How to Tell China's Story Well Through Newsletters".

A sister publication: Ginger River Review

Beijing Scroll cannot be understood apart from Ginger River Review, Jiang's first newsletter, which Substack recommendation pages describe in his own formulation as "Bringing China's Chinese-language conversations to an international audience". Ginger River Review built its reputation on translations and near-full renderings of Chinese official documents, speeches and media coverage — among them a near-full translation of China's State Council institutional reform plan, complete with official notes, diagrams and a review of previous Party and state institutional reforms, and compiled highlights of Chinese officials', scholars', entrepreneurs' and media views of the new premier, Li Qiang. It also ran the Ginger River Radio podcast, in which Jiang interviewed figures such as Wang Huiyao, founder and president of the Center for China and Globalization, a leading non-governmental think tank in Beijing, about China's post-COVID and Track II diplomacy. Recommendations pages across the Substack China-writing ecosystem — including Ginger River Review's own and those of other China newsletters — list Beijing Scroll alongside its sister title, presenting the pair as complementary: Ginger River Review carrying Chinese-language discourse to outsiders, Beijing Scroll explaining the policies, industries and ideas shaping China.

What Beijing Scroll covers

Beijing Scroll's declared beat is explanatory: the policies, industries and ideas shaping China. Its site organises posts into sections that include Society — the section whose page records the newsletter's subscriber count of over 5,000 — as well as culture, technology, macro trends and global affairs. The description of its content in the Too Simple newsletter's industry survey was succinct: dense and wonky. That character follows from its purpose. Where Ginger River Review's signature form was the translation of a Chinese text, Beijing Scroll addresses readers who want the machinery of Chinese policymaking and industry explained in English — what a policy is for, which industries it touches, and which ideas animate it — rather than merely rendered. Its coverage sits within the large English-language Substack ecosystem of China newsletters, alongside titles it is recommended alongside and which recommend it in return, including Pekingnology, whose recommendation pages list it among the newsletters their authors read.

Scale and standing

Beijing Scroll's own pages report over 5,000 subscribers. The wider standing of its author was assessed in Too Simple, Sometimes Naive, a newsletter surveying Chinese media, which called Jiang Jiang one of the most followed — it cited a figure of 13,000 — and most respected writers talking about China on Substack, thanks to his long-running newsletters Ginger River Review and Beijing Scroll, and quoted marketing describing his operation as having the largest overseas subscriber base and the fastest and most stable growth among all newsletters of Chinese media professionals. Those figures describe Jiang's combined newsletter presence rather than Beijing Scroll alone, but they indicate the audience a Beijing-based, state-media-linked journalist was able to build by writing directly, in English, to an international readership on an American platform — the phenomenon that made his newsletters a case study in the first place.

Part of a wider Substack phenomenon

Beijing Scroll emerged as part of a broader movement of Chinese state-media professionals onto Substack. An industry article surveyed by Too Simple described how Xinhua's International Department had launched its own "Beijing Channel" newsletter on the platform, capitalising on demand for high-quality China-related content among influential figures, and quoted Du Jian, deputy director of the External Communication Office of Xinhua's International Department, on the platform's attractions: Substack tapped into disillusionment with mass media, allowed authors to speak directly to readers, and let the state "bypass algorithms" and effectively target information at specific audiences. Too Simple's own series on "Media Studios" examined how Chinese state media were attempting to influence international audiences through supposedly arms-length media professionals, with Substack as that week's subject, and treated Jiang — founder first of Ginger River Review and later of Beijing Scroll — as the key example, citing his publicly disclosed appearances at Tsinghua and at local think tanks sharing his newsletter experience, and a reference to him in a Xinhua article that was later deleted.

The debate over how to read it

The same coverage provoked a pointed rebuttal that is itself part of Beijing Scroll's public record. Writing on China Translated, a former collaborator of Jiang's — who had been involved in Ginger River Review's founding and not involved since early 2023 — criticised the Too Simple account as low-quality character assassination, noting that the Tsinghua lecture photograph it used had been taken from a publicly disclosed WeChat article. The rebuttal objected that, in the critical account, Substack writers from Chinese state media appeared not as humans with agency of their own but as minions commanded by dark forces, and it posed the question readers of Beijing Scroll must answer for themselves: should they trust Jiang Jiang, and what exactly is the relationship between his newsletters and Xinhua? Its author offered personal views on how to read newsletters written by China's state-media employees, starting from the one he knew best. The exchange illustrates the distinctive position Beijing Scroll occupies: a newsletter whose declared affiliation is public, whose author lectures openly about telling China's story, and whose readers are left — as with its sister title — to weigh professional state-media background against the evidence of the writing itself.

How to tell China's story through newsletters

Jiang's Tsinghua lecture is the clearest public statement of the project behind both of his newsletters. Delivered over two hours at one of China's leading universities, in an event organised jointly with its Center for Strategic and Security Studies, the lecture was titled "How to Tell China's Story Well Through Newsletters" — an explicit framing of newsletter publishing as a method of international communication about China. Coming from a journalist who had built, first with Ginger River Review and then with Beijing Scroll, what industry reporting described as the largest overseas subscriber base of any Chinese media professional's newsletter, the lecture marked the point at which a personal Substack project became a teachable model within China's own media establishment. Beijing Scroll, with its explanatory mission across policy, industry and ideas, its sectioned coverage of society, culture and technology, and its readership of more than 5,000 subscribers, is the mature expression of that model: not a translation service but an explanation of China, in English, from Beijing, delivered directly to the inboxes of the international readers who follow Chinese affairs.

Beijing Scroll in the China newsletter ecosystem

For readers navigating English-language writing about China, Beijing Scroll fills a specific gap: explanation of Chinese policy and industry from inside Beijing, by a writer embedded in the Chinese media system whose other newsletter translates that system's own documents and discourse. It is recommended by fellow China newsletters, listed on the recommendation pages of Ginger River Review and of other Substack publications covering China, and surveyed in industry reporting about the migration of Chinese state media onto Western newsletter platforms. Its value and its controversy are the same fact viewed from two sides — direct access, in fluent explanatory English, to how policies, industries and ideas are framed by a Beijing insider, published on a platform where readers accustomed to independent newsletters must decide for themselves how much weight to give the author's institutional home. That unresolved, openly argued question is precisely what has made Beijing Scroll, alongside Ginger River Review, one of the most discussed small publications in the English-language China-watching world.