About Caixin Weekly

Caixin Weekly

Overview

Caixin Weekly is a weekly news and business magazine published in Beijing, China, by Caixin Media, the media group known in Chinese as Caixin Chuanmei. It is the group's signature print publication and carries its longest and most in-depth reporting. The magazine covers finance, business, politics, law and society, and it is known above all for investigative reporting. Its English-language sister operation is Caixin Global, whose website, caixinglobal.com, presents Caixin's financial reporting on China to investors, diplomats and analysts abroad. Caixin Media is headquartered in the Sanlitun SOHO development in Chaoyang District, Beijing, with offices also in Xuhui District, Shanghai, and Quarry Bay, Hong Kong. The group's founder and publisher is Hu Shuli, one of the best-known journalists in mainland China, and Wang Shuo has served as editor-in-chief. Because publishing licences in China are scarce and closely regulated, the weekly licence behind Caixin Weekly is an important anchor for the whole group.

Origins in the 2009 Split from Caijing

Caixin Weekly grew directly out of one of the most famous newsroom breakaways in Chinese journalism. In November 2009, Hu Shuli resigned from Caijing, the business magazine she had founded in 1998, together with the majority of its editors and reporters. Contemporary reporting described weeks of conflict with Caijing's controller, the Stock Exchange Executive Council (SEEC), over coverage of sensitive current affairs stories, along with disputes over wages. Departing staff said the backer wanted the magazine to move away from investigative journalism towards straight coverage of business, in the mode of Fortune. Two months after the split, in January 2010, Hu established Caixin Media and became executive editor of the new publication. The original staff of Caixin Media was composed entirely of former Caijing employees, which meant the new magazine began life with an experienced investigative team already in place.

From News Magazine to New Century Weekly to Caixin Weekly

The new weekly did not start with a completely fresh licence. Hu's team took over a current-affairs publication launched by the Hainan-based China Institute for Reform and Development in October 1988, a title known in English reports of the time as News Magazine. Hu was appointed its editor-in-chief, with former Caijing editorial editor Yang Daming as her deputy, and former Caijing managing editor Wang Shuo was assigned to oversee daily operations. A trial issue reached newsstands at the end of December 2009 with a cover story about looming inflation in China, and the title was then renamed Century Weekly, and later New Century Weekly. In April 2015, Caixin Media announced that New Century Weekly had been renamed Caixin Weekly as of the tenth issue of that year, the 645th issue overall, with the change approved by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. The renaming finally brought the print flagship under the same Caixin name as the group's digital operations.

Publisher and Ownership

Caixin Media was financed by various parties from the start. Hu Shuli secured a 40-million yuan investment from Zhejiang Daily Press Group, the state-owned newspaper conglomerate, for a 40 percent stake in Caixin. Zhejiang Daily later sought to sell part of that stake in 2011 before withdrawing the sale. In July 2012, Tencent became a Caixin stockholder, and in December 2013 China Media Capital (CMC) purchased the 40 percent stake from Zhejiang Daily Press Group, becoming the largest shareholder. Li Ruigang, the chairman of CMC, said on the purchase that the common goal was to build a China-based financial media platform with international influence, and Li is listed as Caixin Media's chairman, with Hu Shuli as president. This backing supported a multimedia operation that, as Stanford's Shorenstein Center described it when Caixin received the 2011 Shorenstein Journalism Award, also included the monthly China Reform, the journal Comparative Studies, an English-language Caixin Weekly edition, a Chinese and English news portal, books, video programming and an international journalism fellowship.

Editorial Focus and Investigative Reporting

Each issue of Caixin Weekly usually leads with a cover investigation on finance, policy, a public-health crisis or a corporate failure, supported by columns, commentary and data features. The magazine inherited Caijing's approach: painstaking verification, documents and numbers first, and a willingness to report on corruption, pollution and public anger in China. That approach has repeatedly drawn international attention. In March 2016, Caixin published an article exposing that the Cyberspace Administration of China had ordered the removal of an article from its Chinese website; publicly exposing such a censorship order, and referring to the administration as a government censorship organ, was considered highly unusual. In November 2018, Caixin reporter Zhou Chen was harassed by police in her hotel room while investigating a petrochemical leak in Quanzhou that had sickened over 50 people, an incident that prompted outrage on social media and a rare apology from local police. In March 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Caixin published photographs of thousands of funeral urns being delivered to a Wuhan funeral home, raising questions about the accuracy of the reported death toll of 2,535 in the city at that time.

Hu Shuli and the Magazine's Leadership

Caixin Weekly cannot be understood apart from its founder. Hu Shuli was born in 1953 and worked at Workers' Daily and China Business Times, where she was international editor, before founding Caijing in 1998. She was a Knight Fellow in journalism at Stanford University and received an honorary doctorate from Princeton University. She is a Ramon Magsaysay Award laureate, recognised for her work in investigative reporting in China, and her citation noted reporting ranging from illegal trading on the Shanghai Stock Exchange to the cover-up of the SARS epidemic. After leaving Caijing she also took up a post as dean of Sun Yat-sen University's School of Communication and Design in December 2009, with a transition period that allowed her to spend time on the new magazine. At Caixin she has described verification as the foundation of the group's reporting, and she remains its publisher and president, setting its editorial direction.

The Paywall and Digital Subscriptions

Caixin Media initially offered content from its website, caixin.com, and its mobile app for free, while charging for the electronic version of its signature magazine. On 6 November 2017 it set up a paywall for caixin.com, becoming the first major Chinese publication to put most of its online content behind a paywall. Hu Shuli said the move was partly to protect content from copyright infringement and to build reader revenue, and she reported that subscription revenue grew sharply in the first year, with more than 200,000 digital annual subscribers by November 2018. The growth continued: reported figures rose from about 300,000 paid subscribers in 2019 to 510,000 in 2020 and 700,000 in 2021. In June 2022 the International Federation of Periodical Publishers (FIPP) put Caixin at around 850,000 digital subscribers, making it the world's largest digital news subscription business outside the United States and United Kingdom at that time. Caixin passed one million paid subscribers in 2023, according to FIPP's Global Digital Subscription Report, and Hu disclosed in May 2024 that it had over 1.2 million paid subscribers.

Caixin Global and International Reach

Caixin launched a simple English-language site, Caixin Online, in 2010, translating a small number of Chinese stories each day. In 2016 it greatly expanded that presence by establishing Caixin Global as a separate company, with Hu Shuli as chief executive and Li Xin as managing director, including a new English-language app and website upgraded from Caixin Online, plus business intelligence services under the Caixin Global Intelligence banner. In April 2018, Caixin Global and CITIC Capital jointly acquired the international business information unit of Britain's Euromoney for $180.5 million, described as one of the biggest offshore purchases ever by a mainstream Chinese media company; the unit's main businesses were CEIC and EMIS, providers of financial information and data in over 15 languages. The Caixin name is also attached to the Caixin China PMI, a closely watched economic index compiled and published monthly by IHS Markit, whose sponsorship Caixin Media took over from HSBC in 2015, with analysis from the Caixin Insight research team. Caixin's summit events in Beijing and Hong Kong, and in 2026 the launch of the Caixin Global Forum, extend the magazine's convening role beyond print.

Recognition, Pressure and Setbacks

Caixin's reporting has brought both honours and pressure. The group received the 2011 Shorenstein Journalism Award from Stanford's Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the first Asian recipient since the award was first given in 2002. International media have repeatedly cited its investigations, and its subscription success has been studied as a model for reader-revenue journalism. At the same time, the group's room to operate has narrowed at points. On 21 October 2021, the Cyberspace Administration of China removed Caixin from its list of news media that can be republished by other outlets, a step widely reported as substantially gagging it as a news source, since republication by portals and aggregators is a major channel of reach in China. The magazine's history therefore illustrates both the possibilities and the limits of investigative business journalism in the Chinese system: a commercially successful, internationally respected weekly that continues to operate within boundaries it has itself sometimes publicly documented.

Caixin Weekly Today

Today Caixin Weekly remains the print flagship of Caixin Media in Beijing, published weekly in Chinese, with its reporting flowing into caixin.com, the Caixin apps and the English-language Caixin Global services. Readers who want the magazine's cover investigations can take the print edition, the electronic edition of the magazine, or a digital subscription that bundles the group's online output. For researchers, the back run matters as much as the current issue: because the title began under the New Century Weekly licence and was renamed only in 2015, library searches for earlier Caixin reporting may need to look under New Century Weekly and Century Weekly as well. The magazine's official English website is caixinglobal.com. Within China's crowded field of business publications, Caixin Weekly occupies a distinctive place as the weekly that carried the Caijing tradition of investigative finance journalism into a new company, a new name and, eventually, a paywalled digital model with more than a million subscribers.