About Caixin Online

Caixin Online

Caixin Online, at caixin.com, is the digital news service of Caixin Media, the Beijing-based media group known internationally for business and investigative journalism. Caixin Media was established in January 2010, following the departure of founder Hu Shuli and most of the editorial team of Caijing magazine in November 2009, and it is headquartered in Sanlitun SOHO in Beijing's Chaoyang District. Wikipedia lists Caixin Media's products as Caixin Weekly and Caixin Online, and the group's English-language edition, Caixin Global, was launched in 2017. Caixin Online became the first major Chinese publication to put most of its online content behind a paywall, and by 2022 Caixin reported more than 850,000 paid subscribers — the largest digital news subscription business in the non-English-speaking world, according to the FIPP ranking it cited.

Origins: the break from Caijing

Caixin cannot be understood without Caijing, the business magazine Hu Shuli founded in 1998. Under Hu, Caijing built a reputation for revealing investigative reporting, including stories on illegal trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and on the cover-up of the SARS epidemic, with a circulation reported at 225,000. In November 2009, Hu resigned from Caijing along with around 90 percent of its journalists, following the resignation of the business department's leadership, after long-running differences with the magazine's publisher. The team regrouped as Caixin Media. The weekly magazine they took over and relaunched published its first issue under Caixin on 4 January 2010 — initially as a revamped current-affairs title, renamed Century Weekly (Caixin Weekly) — and the group's online division was running alongside the magazine's next issue in January 2010. Zhejiang Daily Press Group was reported to be a major backer of the new venture.

Hu Shuli and the newsroom's leadership

Hu Shuli, born in 1953, is Caixin's founder and publisher and one of the best-known journalists in mainland China. Before founding Caijing she worked at Workers' Daily and as international editor at China Business Times, and spent five months in the United States as a World Press Institute fellow in 1987, an experience she later wrote about in a book introducing American journalism practice to Chinese readers. She is a former Knight Fellow at Stanford University and an honorary doctorate recipient from Princeton University. Her standing was recognised internationally when Time named her among its 100 most influential people in 2011 and Foreign Policy twice included her among its Top 100 Global Thinkers, in 2009 and 2010. She received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2014. Within Caixin, Wang Shuo served as editor-in-chief and was ranked among China's top ten young editors in 2011; Li Ruigang has served as chairman of Caixin Media.

Investigative journalism as the core product

Investigative reporting is the foundation of Caixin's reputation and of its subscription value. Stanford's Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, which gave Caixin its 2011 Shorenstein Journalism Award — the first time the award went to a recipient in Asia — cited the team's probes into the errors that led to a high-speed train crash in China and into the seizure and sale of children by family-planning officials in Hunan province, and quoted The Economist calling Caixin "one of China's more outspoken media organizations." Caixin's coverage of the Wenzhou high-speed rail crash extended into corruption cases linked to senior officials. The group also won international attention for breaking news on opaque major companies such as Anbang Insurance Group, for financial-fraud reporting including the collapse of peer-to-peer lending, and for early ground reporting from Wuhan in the first weeks of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020. Profiles of Hu Shuli's method stress the verification discipline behind such stories: in China's media environment, factual error in explosive reporting carries exceptional risk, so checking is treated as the foundation of the work.

The 2017 paywall: a first for Chinese media

Caixin Online initially offered website and app content free, charging only for the electronic edition of its magazine. On 6 November 2017 Caixin put up a paywall on caixin.com, becoming the first major Chinese publication to place most of its online content behind one. Caixin Global's account of the move states that it was intended both to protect content from copyright infringement — a chronic problem Caixin fought aggressively, taking legal action against major portals including Sina and Sohu — and to build subscription revenue. Announced plans started at 498 yuan (about US$75) a year. Caixin Global had launched its own paid subscription service earlier in 2017, in the spring. Commentators at the time noted the risk: China's internet audience was accustomed to free content, and a rival, China Business News, said it had no plans to follow. Caixin persisted, describing its model as "News + Data," and the subscriber base grew from 300,000 paid subscribers in 2019 (ranked 15th globally by FIPP, and the only Chinese outlet listed) to 510,000 in 2020, more than 700,000 in the 2021 rankings, and over 850,000 in the 2022 FIPP snapshot, where Caixin ranked ninth worldwide and first among non-English-language news subscription services, with growth of 21 percent since the first half of 2021.

Caixin Global and the international edition

Caixin Global, the group's English-language arm, launched in 2017, building on the older English pages of the Caixin website. It translates and adapts selected Chinese-language reporting and publishes original English stories on markets, regulation, technology and macroeconomic policy for investors, diplomats and analysts abroad, on a subscription basis supplemented by content partnerships and syndication. In February 2018 Caixin Global, together with Citic Capital, agreed to buy the Global Market Intelligence Division of Britain's Euromoney for US$180.5 million — described at the time as one of the biggest offshore purchases ever by a mainstream Chinese media company, and Caixin's largest acquisition. The Hong Kong-based division's main units, CEIC and EMIS, provide financial information and data in more than 15 languages with a focus on emerging markets; the unit had reported 2016 revenue of about US$52.7 million. The deal was presented as a step toward building a global news and information platform in the territory of Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and The Economist.

Data products: the Caixin PMI and Caixin Insight

Beyond news, Caixin's name reaches global markets every month through the Caixin China Purchasing Managers' Index. The Caixin PMI began as the HSBC China PMI; Caixin took over sponsorship in 2015, and the survey is compiled by Markit, now part of S&P Global. It appears in manufacturing and services versions, combined into a composite index, and is closely watched worldwide as a snapshot of China's economic health, particularly of the private sector. The data business is organised through Caixin Insight Group, described by the company as a high-end financial data and analysis platform, and through subscriber products such as Caixin Data Express, launched alongside the Chinese subscription product Caixin Express and the English Caixin Global subscription packages at the end of 2017. This news-plus-data structure distinguishes Caixin from purely editorial competitors.

Publications, conferences and other products

Caixin Media is a multi-product group. Its publications have included the weekly Caixin Century/Caixin Weekly, the monthly China Reform, the bimonthly journal Comparative Studies and an English-language Caixin Weekly on Chinese economics and finance. The group also produces books, TV and video programming, runs an international journalism fellowship program, and stages the Caixin Summit, its flagship annual conference bringing together policymakers, economists, business leaders and foreign guests to discuss China's economic direction. Since its founding, the group has described its business model as covering Chinese and English media, conferences, data and other products at multiple levels, aimed at what it calls China's most influential audience.

Recognition and standing

Caixin's standing rests on both its journalism and its experiment in reader revenue. The 2011 Shorenstein Journalism Award recognised its commitment to journalistic integrity and its path-breaking role in establishing independent media in China, noting that the company was guided by an independent advisory board of Chinese and foreign academics and intellectuals. Its paywall experiment is routinely cited as the reference case for subscription journalism in China: the first major outlet to charge comprehensively for online news, in a market where most content was free and advertising-funded, and the only Chinese media outlet to appear in FIPP's global digital subscription rankings for four consecutive years as of 2022.

Official website and access

Caixin Online is published at caixin.com, with the English-language Caixin Global at caixinglobal.com. Most in-depth content sits behind the subscription paywall introduced in November 2017, with subscription packages offered for the Chinese service, the data products and the English service. The group is headquartered in Sanlitun SOHO, Chaoyang District, Beijing, and remains led by its founder and publisher Hu Shuli, whose move with her Caijing team in late 2009 created the organisation that Caixin Online now anchors.