About Caijing

Caijing

Overview

Caijing is a Beijing-based business magazine, published biweekly, whose name means finance and economics in Chinese and is sometimes rendered in English as Business and Finance Review. It was established by editor Hu Shuli, with its first issue in June 1998 according to the magazine's own record, and it is managed by the Stock Exchange Executive Council (SEEC), a government-backed institute that promotes China's financial markets. Caijing covers societal, political, economic and business affairs, and it built a circulation reported at around 200,000 to 225,000 copies. Above all, it became known for investigative reporting: detailed exposés of stock-market manipulation, false accounting, corporate fraud and official cover-ups that, in the 2000s, made it a must-read for anyone doing business in China and one of the most influential magazines in the country.

Founding in 1998

Hu Shuli launched Caijing in 1998 with the backing of China's nascent financial community. Contemporary reporting records that she launched the magazine in April 1998 with support from the China Stock Exchange Executive Council, while the magazine's first issue is dated June 1998. The SEEC's chairman was Wang Boming, a former Wall Street banker who helped obtain financing for the publication when it started, and the magazine largely depended on the political protection of its well-connected backer. Hu brought a reporter's formation to the venture: she had covered corruption scandals for Workers' Daily, spent five months in the United States as a fellow of the World Press Institute in 1987, later held a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, and had become chief of the international desk at China Business Times by 1995. The cover of Caijing's first issue focused on a property company with a rocketing share price that had been suspended from trading after overstating its profits, while a few insiders, tipped off beforehand, had managed to unload their shares — a template for the magazine's investor-protection reporting from the very first edition.

Growth from a Staff of Six

Caijing did not begin as a large operation. An Associated Press profile published in 2002 described it growing from an unknown monthly with a staff of six into a glossy biweekly with a staff of more than 50 and an estimated circulation of 100,000. Later profiles put its circulation at 225,000. Hu explained the magazine's working method with a practical question: who pays for the taxis? Fed up with the penny-pinching that she said prevented most Chinese journalists from doing their jobs properly, she had secured backing that allowed reporters to travel, verify and investigate. By 2009, Hu herself said, Caijing had become one of mainland China's most reputable sources of journalism, number one among magazines in advertising revenue and probably one of the most profitable magazines in China. Its incisive reports on false financial data and other corporate misdeeds set off scandals over false accounting and poor corporate governance.

The Investigations That Made Its Name

Caijing's reputation rests on specific investigations. In 2000 the magazine reported on stock-market manipulation and insider trading by some of China's leading investment firms — ICIJ's profile of Hu records reporting on insider trading and stock manipulation by ten Chinese brokerages — rocking the securities industry. A year later it investigated share-ramping schemes. Its reports led regulators to crack down on investment trusts caught manipulating the market. In 2003, Caijing was one of the few Chinese media outlets to report critically on the SARS crisis, detailing government efforts to cover up the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome after the illness first appeared in Guangdong province in late 2002. In 2008, after the Sichuan earthquake, Caijing reported on how construction standards had been ignored and public money wasted, contributing to the collapse of many schools. These were the kinds of stories — securities fraud, public-health cover-ups, disaster accountability — that defined the magazine's first decade.

Hu Shuli and the Editorial Approach

Hu Shuli, Caijing's founding editor, was frequently referred to internationally as the most dangerous, or most feared, woman in China because of her emphasis on aggressive investigative reporting. In 2001, BusinessWeek recognised her as one of the 50 Stars of Asia, and she later received the Ramon Magsaysay Award, whose citation for her work noted reporting on illegal trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the SARS cover-up and other forms of business fraud, reports that prompted government responses including the removal of public officials. Yet Hu was explicit that Caijing worked within limits. She told The New York Times in 2005: "I know how to measure the boundary lines. We go up to the line — and we might even push it. But we never cross it." Political exposés of the highest level remained off limits, and topics such as the Falun Gong movement were avoided. In 2007 she attracted attention with a series of editorials calling on the government to accelerate democratic change and to end monopolies and introduce more competition into the Chinese market.

The 2009 Departure and the Birth of Caixin

Caijing's defining modern event was the departure of its founder. In November 2009, Hu Shuli resigned along with a large portion of Caijing's journalists after weeks of conflict with the magazine's controller, SEEC, over issues including its coverage of sensitive current affairs stories; departing employees said the backer wanted the magazine to move away from investigative journalism towards straight business coverage, and there were also disputes over wages. Media scholar Jeremy Goldkorn called Hu's departure a big loss for SEEC. Hu took up a post as dean of Sun Yat-sen University's School of Communication and Design on 18 December 2009, and within two months she had established Caixin Media, whose original staff was composed entirely of former Caijing employees and whose weekly became Caixin Weekly. Caijing itself continued under SEEC management without its founding team. The split created an unusual situation in Chinese media: two similarly named titles, Caijing and Caixin, carrying forward different parts of the same editorial tradition.

Caijing After 2009

The magazine continued publishing after Hu's departure and retained its reputation for hard-hitting investigations. Its continued standing was visible internationally in 2015, when Caijing reporter Wang Xiaolu was among the most prominent targets when China's Ministry of Public Security arrested nearly 200 people at the end of August that year for spreading rumours, in the aftermath of market turmoil. Reporting on the case described Caijing as a respected business magazine with a strong reputation for investigations and for pushing the boundaries of what the government might deem permissible. The episode underlined that, even without its founding editor, Caijing remained a title whose individual reporters could become national news. For readers distinguishing the two publications, the practical rule is chronological and corporate: stories before late 2009 belong to Hu Shuli's Caijing under SEEC; the Caixin titles that followed were produced by her new company, while Caijing stayed with SEEC.

Place in Chinese Media History

Caijing occupies a foundational place in the history of modern Chinese journalism. Academic and journalistic profiles describe Hu and her magazine as pioneering Western-style investigative reporting in a country where all but a handful of media were owned and run by the state and where reporters routinely received cash handouts at news conferences. The magazine demonstrated that a commercially successful Chinese publication could build its brand on verification and exposure of corporate wrongdoing, winning international fellowships and awards for its editor and prompting regulatory action with its stories. Its model influenced a generation of Chinese business journalists, many of whom passed through its newsroom before staffing Caixin and other outlets. At the same time, its history shows the structural conditions of that achievement: dependence on a powerful institutional backer for protection, negotiated boundaries around sensitive topics, and a founder-owner conflict that eventually split the newsroom in two.

Reading Caijing Today

For readers and researchers, Caijing is a biweekly magazine from Beijing covering business, finance, the economy, politics and society in Chinese. When citing it, care is needed with the name: Caijing and Caixin are different publications despite their similar names, shared founder and overlapping staff history, and English-language sources sometimes confuse them. Key facts for identification are its 1998 founding by Hu Shuli, its management by the Stock Exchange Executive Council, and its biweekly frequency. Its archive from 1998 to 2009 documents the Hu Shuli era — the fund and securities investigations of 2000 and 2001, the SARS reporting of 2003 and the Sichuan school-construction reporting of 2008 — while the post-2009 archive documents SEEC's continuation of the title. Either way, Caijing remains one of the reference points against which Chinese business magazines are measured.