About Changjiang Daily

Changjiang Daily

Changjiang Daily (长江日报, Changjiang Ribao), also called Yangtze Daily in English, is the official newspaper of the Wuhan Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and one of the oldest continuously significant city newspapers in the People's Republic of China. It was founded in Hankou, Wuhan, on 23 May 1949 — a week after the People's Liberation Army captured the city — with its masthead personally written by Mao Zedong. It is published and distributed by the Changjiang Daily Newspaper Group (now also styled the Wuhan Changjiang Daily Media Group), from the Changjiang Media Building at No. 113 Jinqiao Avenue, Jiang'an District, Wuhan, Hubei province. Its readers are described as mainly enterprises, government agencies, schools and intellectuals. Few Chinese newspapers carry a founding story so tightly bound to the founding of the state itself, and few have been closed, renamed, merged and revived as often — its history is a compact history of the Chinese party press in miniature.

Founding in May 1949

Wuhan, the central Chinese metropolis where the Yangtze (Changjiang) meets the Han River, was captured by the People's Liberation Army on 16 May 1949, in the final months of the Chinese Civil War. Seven days later, on 23 May 1949, Changjiang Daily was founded at No. 2 Taining Street in Hankou, one of Wuhan's three historic districts. The address itself was laden with press history: the site was the former home of Hankou's Republican-era Minguo Daily. Mao Zedong personally wrote the paper's masthead — the calligraphic title under which it still publishes — giving the young paper an emblem of authority no other Wuhan title could match.

The paper's name announced its geography. Changjiang is the Chinese name of the Yangtze, Asia's longest river, on whose banks Wuhan stands; the English rendering "Yangtze Daily" makes the same claim. From its first issue the paper was positioned not as a neighbourhood sheet but as the organ of a region: the Yangtze city that Chinese geography calls the thoroughfare of nine provinces.

One Paper, Three Committees

In its first years Changjiang Daily held a status no Wuhan paper has held since. After the Central Plains Bureau of the CCP Central Committee moved into Wuhan and was reorganised — becoming first the Central China Bureau and then the Central South Bureau — Changjiang Daily served simultaneously as the official newspaper of that powerful supra-provincial bureau, of the Wuhan Municipal Committee of the CCP, and of the Hubei Provincial Committee of the CCP. A single Wuhan newsroom thus spoke for the party across central and southern China, for the province of Hubei and for the city of Wuhan at once.

That concentration could not last once each level of the party built its own organ. On 1 June 1950 the Hubei Provincial Committee adopted the revived Hubei Daily as its official newspaper. On 1 January 1952 the Wuhan Municipal Committee adopted the New Wuhan Daily as its official newspaper. Changjiang Daily was left as the official newspaper of the Central South Bureau alone — still senior, but no longer the voice of the city whose name it effectively carried.

The 1952 Handover of the Name

At the end of 1952 the Central South Bureau concluded that, since every province and city under its jurisdiction had now established its own official newspaper, the bureau's paper was no longer needed. It decided that Changjiang Daily would cease publication after its issue of 31 December 1952. What happened next is the most unusual episode in the paper's history: the name itself was transferred. The Wuhan Municipal Committee took over the title "Changjiang Daily," and the New Wuhan Daily was renamed Changjiang Daily and continued publication under it. Some staff of the original Changjiang Daily and the staff of the former New Wuhan Daily jointly produced the new paper. The Changjiang Daily that Wuhan readers have read ever since descends institutionally from that handover — a new paper carrying a three-year-old name, its Mao-written masthead and its claim on the city's identity.

Merger, Closure and Revival

The disruptions of the era were not finished. In 1960 Changjiang Daily merged with Hubei Daily, the provincial party paper, and in 1961 it closed altogether. For six years Wuhan had no Changjiang Daily. In 1967, during the Cultural Revolution decade, the paper resumed publication, and it has continued since as Wuhan's municipal party newspaper. The pattern — merger, suspension and revival — was common among Chinese party papers in those decades, when titles were repeatedly reorganised as administrative structures changed; what distinguishes Changjiang Daily is that each time, the title, the masthead and the municipal role were restored rather than replaced.

Through the reform era the paper settled into its modern identity: the authoritative daily of the Wuhan municipal party committee, read by the city's enterprises, agencies, schools and intellectuals, and the senior title around which a newspaper group would eventually be built. Its website is published at cjrb.cjn.cn, and library catalogues in the Library of Congress and the National Library of Australia hold its record under both "Changjiang Daily" and the pinyin "Changjiang Ribao."

Readers, Headquarters and Position in Wuhan

Changjiang Daily's headquarters are the Changjiang Media Building at No. 113 Jinqiao Avenue in Jiang'an District, Wuhan — a modern media tower that houses the group built around it. Its stated readership of enterprises, government agencies, schools and intellectuals reflects the classic audience of a Chinese municipal party daily: institutional subscribers and the professional public of a provincial capital. Wuhan is one of China's largest cities, a sub-provincial metropolis and the political, economic and transport centre of central China, and its municipal organ operates in a crowded local market alongside the provincial Hubei Daily and the Hubei group's metro papers, as well as its own group's commercial titles. Within that market Changjiang Daily occupies the formal, authoritative tier — the paper of record for the municipal committee's decisions, announcements and interpretation of policy.

The China Media Project's study of front pages on the centenary of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution — an anniversary of special weight in Wuhan, where the revolution began with the Wuchang Uprising — shows that position in practice: Changjiang Daily gave the commemoration prominent front-page treatment in the mainstream party manner, with local Wuhan angles below the fold, alongside its commercial spin-off Wuhan Morning Post.

Building the Changjiang Daily Newspaper Group

In 2003 the paper became the foundation of a newspaper group. On 28 December 2003 Changjiang Daily and Wuhan Evening News joined forces to form the Changjiang Daily Newspaper Group. The Evening News was itself a historic title, founded on 1 May 1961 and counted among China's earliest evening newspapers. The grouping followed the national policy of the era, under which China's party newspapers were consolidated into press groups meant to be commercially stronger while remaining under party control.

The group's commercial arm had been growing since the 1990s. Wuhan Morning Post, the group's metropolitan daily, was founded on 15 March 1999; after a September 2004 redesign emphasising local news it was publishing an average of 41 pages a day with circulation above 600,000 copies, known for features such as "Citizen Stories," and it later became Wuhan Metro's exclusive metro newspaper, publishing Monday to Friday. The group's Evening News also reached international circulation rankings: in the world top-100 daily circulation list released at the 58th World Newspaper Congress in 2005, Wuhan Evening News ranked 85th in the world with average daily circulation of 800,000. The group today also trades in expanded form as the Changjiang Daily Press Group and, in recent innovation-case listings, as Wuhan Changjiang Daily Media Group Co., Ltd.

Digital Reinvention: Jiupai News

The group's boldest move was digital. On 23 September 2015 the Changjiang Daily Newspaper Group officially launched Jiupai News (九派新闻), a new-media platform created to be "born for the internet" rather than adapted from print. Its founding statement, "The Tide of the Heart Rises High," was published simultaneously on the Jiupai News app, its WeChat public account and in Changjiang Daily itself. Even the name is rooted in Wuhan letters: "Jiupai" — nine rivers, or nine tributaries — is taken from Mao Zedong's poem "Yellow Crane Tower," written about Wuhan's landmark tower, in the line "the vast nine rivers flow through China, and a single line runs through the north and south."

A decade on, Jiupai is the measure of the group's reach. A report on the 2026 China Newspaper Innovation Development Cases exhibition, at which two Hubei cases — both from Changjiang Daily — were selected, described Jiupai News as having built, over six years of growth, a communication matrix covering 30 platforms and 160 accounts, with more than 78 million followers across the internet and average daily reading volumes above 400 million. In the central propaganda authorities' evaluation of new-media production and dissemination by mainstream media, Jiupai's Douyin account ranked first among local media for 2025, its Weibo account fourth, and its WeChat account consistently in the monthly top ten; since 2024, eight of its works had been selected among the national "Three Good Works." The same 2026 exhibition selected the group's Wuhan smart health service platform, built jointly with the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission and described as China's first media-led city smart medical service platform, as an operations-service innovation case.

Recognition

Institutional honours have accumulated across both the print and digital eras. In 2010 Changjiang Daily was elected among "China's Top 10 Media Groups that Influenced China in 2009–2010." In 2018 it was named to the 2017 national list of the Top 100 Newspapers in China. The 2026 innovation-case selections for Jiupai News and for the group's smart health platform extend that record into the platform era, and were noted in Hubei coverage precisely because both of the province's selected cases came from the Changjiang Daily organisation. For a paper whose group spans a 1949 party organ, a 1961 evening paper, a 1999 metro daily and a 2015 internet-native news brand, the honours trace a deliberate strategy: keep the historic title at the centre, and let each generation of Wuhan media grow around it.

Significance

Changjiang Daily's importance rests on its unusual biography. It was founded with a masthead from Mao Zedong a week after its city changed hands in a civil war; it briefly served three levels of the Communist Party at once; it was abolished in 1952 and yet never disappeared, because its name was handed to another paper to carry; it merged, closed and revived again before emerging, in the twenty-first century, as the core of a media group whose Jiupai News platform now reaches audiences its founders could not have imagined. Wuhan is a city built where rivers meet, and its municipal paper has survived by behaving like its river: changing course, absorbing tributaries, and keeping its name. For researchers, its catalogued run — held by national libraries abroad as well as in China — makes it one of the essential primary sources for the history of Wuhan and of the Chinese party press since 1949.