About Benxi Television

Benxi Television

Overview

Benxi Television is the prefecture-level television station of Benxi in eastern Liaoning province, China, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now integrated into the Benxi converged media centre. Its flagship news channel serves Benxi and its counties in Mandarin, carrying local news, public affairs and livelihood programming for one of China's classic steel cities.

Benxi presents its broadcaster with a striking double image: a heavy-industry city built on coal and iron around the great Benxi Steel works, set inside mountains of extraordinary beauty — the Benxi Water Cave, maple valleys with the highest forest coverage in Liaoning, and Manchu autonomous counties. Benxi Television reports both Benxis: the furnaces and the forests, and the city's long effort to be known for the second as much as the first.

The city it serves

Benxi lies in the eastern mountains of Liaoning, some 75 kilometres south-southeast of Shenyang, along the Taizi River. Mountains and hills make up about 80 per cent of its 8,411 square kilometres — "eight mountains, one river, one field", in the local formula — and its forest coverage of about 76 per cent ranks first in Liaoning. The 2020 census counted 1,326,018 residents, down from 1,709,538 in 2010, with about 809,655 in the urban districts of Pingshan, Xihu and Mingshan.

The prefecture also administers Benxi Manchu Autonomous County and Huanren Manchu Autonomous County — mountain counties of rivers, reservoirs and maple forest. The urban core, squeezed into the Taizi valley beside the steelworks, and the green counties beyond make two worlds within one prefecture, and the station's schedule must speak to both: steelworkers and shift rosters in the city, farmers, foresters and tourism workers in the counties.

Steel city: Bengang and the coal-iron era

Benxi was founded as a metallurgical centre in 1915, on the strength of local coal and iron ore, and the Benxi Iron and Steel Company — Bengang — became the city's reason for being: once China's fourth-largest steelmaker, producing on the order of 14 million tonnes of pig iron and 13 million tonnes of steel a year. The city's growth, housing, schools and identity were organised around the works for a century, through Japanese occupation exploitation and the planned-economy decades when Benxi steel built the republic.

The valley setting that concentrated industry also trapped its smoke: Benxi was once identified internationally as one of the world's most polluted cities, a satellite-era symbol of industrial smog. Cleanup since then has been a civic epic in its own right. For Benxi Television, industrial coverage is existential reporting — furnaces, orders, restructuring and air quality are the news its core audience lives by — while the pollution-to-clean-air story frames the city's account of itself.

The Water Cave and the maple capital

Twenty-six kilometres east of the city lies the Benxi Water Cave, a karst system some five million years in the making: a cavern about 5,800 metres long whose underground river — described as the world's longest navigable by boat — carries visitors 2,800 metres through illuminated stalactite halls at a constant cool temperature, alongside a dry cave and a geological museum displaying petrified wood 140 million years old. Designated a national 5A scenic area in 2015, it is Liaoning's signature underground attraction.

Above ground, autumn belongs to the maples. Benxi calls itself China's Maple Leaf Capital: the Benhuan Highway — the "China Maple Leaf Road" — Guanmen Mountain, Laobiangou and the valleys of the two Manchu counties turn red and gold each October, drawing photographers from across the northeast. Tanggou's hot springs and the counties' river scenery complete a tourism portfolio utterly unlike the steel city's image. The station's seasonal features — cave, maples, springs — are its most widely shared productions.

Channels and services

Benxi Television's flagship news channel is the prefecture's general television service in Mandarin, combining news bulletins with public-affairs, livelihood, industrial and tourism programming. Distribution covers the valley city and the mountain counties, and the converged media centre extends the station's reporting to mobile platforms in Benxi and to the provincial audiences its tourism content attracts.

As the municipal broadcaster beneath Liaoning Television and CCTV, the station sustains the continuous local record — steelworks and county markets, air-quality readings and maple forecasts — that defines prefecture television's value. Its archive holds the visual history of the steel city and its greening alike.

News and livelihood programming

The news agenda is headed by industry and environment: steel production and Bengang's restructuring, employment in the industrial districts, and the air and water quality that residents check as weather. Municipal services, transport in the valley city, health and education form the livelihood core. County news brings agriculture, forestry and tourism from Benxi and Huanren counties, whose Manchu communities add their own cultural and linguistic colour to the prefecture's life.

Public-affairs programming mediates between the city and its great industrial neighbour — the works whose decisions shape thousands of households — explaining policy on restructuring, pensions and urban renewal to the workforce that must live with them.

Industry in transition

Benxi's economic story is the northeast's story in miniature: a resource-and-steel city absorbing slower growth, a falling population — down by some 380,000 in a decade — and the need to build new pillars. Alongside steel and its deep-processing chain, the prefecture promotes pharmaceuticals and health industries in its high-tech zone, building on local medicine traditions, and the tourism economy of cave, maple and spring. The station's economic journalism follows each strand: furnace lines and pharma plants, county tourism receipts and the maple season's crowds.

Environmental restoration is economic news too: the cleaner air that now lets the valley see its own mountains is the precondition of the tourism strategy, and the broadcaster reports it as such — a measurable civic achievement renewed daily.

Manchu counties and mountain culture

Benxi and Huanren are Manchu autonomous counties, and Manchu culture — its language traces, shamanic traditions, food and festivals, and sites such as Xiaoshi town's heritage — is woven into the prefecture's identity and the station's cultural programming. Huanren holds its own treasures: the Wunv Mountain city, a Goguryeo-era mountain fortress inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list as part of the ancient kingdom's capitals and tombs, and great reservoirs on the Hun River.

Cultural coverage thus ranges from steel-city workers' culture — the clubs, choirs and factory heritage of the Bengang era — to mountain-county ritual and craft. Few prefecture stations serve two such different cultural worlds, and the contrast is a creative resource the station draws on year-round.

The converged media centre era

Benxi Television operates within the city's converged media centre, the product of the national reform unifying local radio, television and new media into one newsroom organisation. For Benxi, convergence aligns the broadcaster with the city's rebranding: the centre's digital platforms are the natural home of maple-season video, cave features and mountain scenery, content that markets the green Benxi to the whole country.

At home, the same centre delivers the service functions — air quality, weather, municipal notices, industrial-community information — to phones across the valley and the counties, keeping the municipal media present in daily life as viewing habits change.

Audience and community role

The station's audience is a city of steel families and mountain counties: workers and pensioners of the great works, Manchu villagers in Huanren and Benxi counties, tourism workers in the scenic valleys. Its community role is to hold those worlds in one conversation — reporting the furnaces honestly, celebrating the forests persuasively, and supplying the practical information both populations need.

In a prefecture whose population is shrinking, local television also serves as civic reassurance: a daily demonstration that Benxi's institutions, culture and ambitions continue, addressed to residents deciding whether their future lies in the Taizi valley.

Significance and outlook

Benxi Television documents one of China's emblematic industrial transformations — from the smog capital of the satellite age to a city whose air, forests and maple valleys are now its pride. Its cameras recorded both eras; its current output argues, daily, that the second Benxi is real.

The outlook depends on the strategy working: tourism and new industries growing fast enough to anchor the community the station serves. If they do, Benxi Television will have been both witness and instrument of the change — the medium through which a steel city learned to see its mountains.