About Changjiang Net

Changjiang Net

Changjiang Net, published at cjn.cn and known in Chinese as Changjiang Wang — the Yangtze River Network — is the Wuhan digital news portal of the Changjiang Daily Press Group in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China. It publishes Wuhan and Hubei news and the digital editions of the group's newspapers, above all the Changjiang Daily, the official newspaper of the Wuhan Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, founded on 23 May 1949. Changjiang Net is the city-level gateway for Wuhan. It is distinct from Jingchu Net, the provincial-level Hubei portal, just as the Changjiang Daily is distinct from the Hubei Daily: one system serves the city of Wuhan, the other serves the whole province, and Changjiang Net belongs firmly to the city system.

Overview

A portal like Changjiang Net exists to move a newspaper group's journalism from paper to screen without losing what made the paper authoritative. The Changjiang Daily's readers have long been described as mainly enterprises, government agencies, schools and intellectuals — the institutional readership of an official municipal newspaper. Changjiang Net carries that same journalism to those readers online, while adding the continuous, web-first municipal news service that a printed daily cannot provide: Wuhan news as it happens, Hubei news with a Wuhan perspective, and the group's editions published in digital form, including the Changjiang Daily's own online edition presence at cjrb.cjn.cn within the cjn.cn domain.

The group's headquarters underline the scale of the operation behind the website. The Changjiang Daily is headquartered at the Changjiang Media Building, No. 113 Jinqiao Avenue, Jiang'an District, Wuhan. A named media building, a press group formed in 2003, and a flagship title dating to 1949 stand behind what might otherwise look like just another city website. Changjiang Net is best understood as the digital front of that institution.

History of the Parent Newspaper

The Changjiang Daily was founded days after Wuhan changed hands at the end of the Chinese Civil War. On 16 May 1949, the People's Liberation Army captured Wuhan, the large city on both banks of the Changjiang — the Yangtze, China's longest river. On 23 May 1949, the Changjiang Daily was founded at No. 2 Taining Street, Hankou, and Mao Zedong personally wrote the masthead for the new paper. Few Chinese newspapers can point to a founding detail like that, and it has remained central to the paper's identity ever since.

In its first years the paper served several masters at once. It became the official newspaper of the Central China Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee — later renamed the Central South Bureau — as well as of the Wuhan Municipal Committee and the Hubei Provincial Committee. The provincial role ended first: on 1 June 1950, the Hubei Provincial Committee adopted the Hubei Daily as its official newspaper. Then, on 1 January 1952, the Wuhan Municipal Committee adopted the New Wuhan Daily as its official newspaper, leaving the Changjiang Daily as solely the official newspaper of the Central South Bureau. At the end of 1952, judging that all provinces and cities under its jurisdiction had established their own official newspapers, the Central South Bureau decided the Changjiang Daily would cease publication on 31 December 1952. The Wuhan Municipal Committee then took over the Changjiang Daily name, and the New Wuhan Daily was renamed Changjiang Daily to continue publication — so the title survived, carried forward by the city whose name it now primarily serves.

The interruptions continued. In 1960 the Changjiang Daily merged with the Hubei Daily, and it closed in 1961. In 1967 it resumed publication. That long arc — founding in 1949, a name transferred and preserved in 1952, merger and closure in the early 1960s, and resumption in 1967 — is the institutional past that Changjiang Net digitises. When readers open the group's editions online, they are reading a title that has been closed, merged and revived, and has come through each change still as Wuhan's official daily.

From Newspaper Group to Digital Portal

The modern structure dates from 2003, when the Changjiang Daily Newspaper Group was founded based on the Changjiang Daily. Group formation was the step that turned a single official newspaper into a media organisation able to run multiple titles, businesses and, crucially, digital platforms. Changjiang Net — the Yangtze River Network — is the group's portal within that structure, and group reporting in later years described the integration of the scattered business resources of the Changjiang Daily group, its evening and morning papers and the Yangtze River Network into organised business divisions, including government-affairs communication among 14 business value chains. In 2018, the group reported operating income rising against the trend, with media operating income up by more than 95 million yuan year on year and all 14 business divisions achieving profits — figures cited at the time as a sample for how a city party newspaper group could finance its transformation.

The same period saw the group invest in Wuhan's wider digital ambitions. Group leadership was credited with giving play to the professional advantages of mainstream media in network ideological security, participating in the construction of the national network security base in Wuhan, and promoting the signing of the Yangtze River Digital Media City project. Changjiang Net sits inside that strategy: it is both a news product and part of a municipal media group's attempt to build digital businesses around its journalism.

Wuhan: The City and Region It Covers

Wuhan is one of China's great river cities. Britannica describes it as the capital and a major industrial and commercial city of Hubei province, located at the confluence of the Han and Yangtze rivers, and formed of three adjacent former cities — Hankou, Hanyang and Wuchang. Hankou lies on the north bank of the Yangtze at the mouth of the Han; Hanyang is immediately across the Han from it; and Wuchang, the ancient metropolis on the south bank of the Yangtze and the seat of the provincial government, stands across from both. In 1949 the government of the newly formed People's Republic merged the three cities into the single entity of Wuhan — the same year the Changjiang Daily was founded in Hankou, which is why the paper's birth and the modern city's birth belong to the same moment.

The city is the most populous in central China, with a population of over 11 million, and it is known as the "Thoroughfare of Nine Provinces" for its position at the meeting of the middle reaches of the Yangtze and Han rivers in the eastern Jianghan Plain. It is a national transport hub, an industrial powerhouse — its East Lake High-Tech Development Zone is known as Optics Valley, and its automotive sector has included five automobile enterprises, more than ten passenger-vehicle factories and more than 500 parts enterprises — and a city of 130 museums, from the 3,500-year-old Panlongcheng site to the collections of the Wuhan Museum. It was in Wuchang that the armed uprising of October 1911 began against the Qing dynasty, leading to the establishment of the Republic of China. A Wuhan news portal therefore covers municipal affairs in a city that is simultaneously a provincial capital, a manufacturing centre, a university city and a place of national historical significance.

News Coverage

Changjiang Net's coverage is built around Wuhan first. Municipal government and party affairs — the official record that the Changjiang Daily exists to publish — sit alongside district news from across the conurbation, from Jiang'an District, where the group is headquartered, to the development zones of the city's east. Hubei coverage follows, reported from the provincial capital outward, and national and Yangtze River coverage completes the picture for a paper named after the river itself. Reporting credited to Changjiang Daily reaches international audiences as well: its Wuhan International Communications Center produced the multimedia series "Understanding China, Discover Wuhan," launched in January with a first episode, "This is Wuhan," introducing the city's museums and history to international visitors — an example of the group's city storytelling travelling far beyond Hubei through syndication.

The portal model means that coverage is not limited to a single daily edition. Wuhan stories can be published as they develop, the printed Changjiang Daily and the group's other editions can be read in digital form, and major city themes — transport, industry, culture, the river itself — can be followed across days rather than in a single morning's paper. For institutional readers in government agencies, enterprises and schools, that continuity is the point: the official city record, kept current online.

Digital Editions and Platforms

Within the cjn.cn domain, the Changjiang Daily's own digital presence is at cjrb.cjn.cn — the letters stand for the paper's Chinese name, Changjiang Ribao. That arrangement captures Changjiang Net's dual nature in a single address structure: cjn.cn is the group portal and city news service, while the newspaper's edition lives inside it as a distinct, named publication. Readers who want the paper get the paper; readers who want the city's rolling news get the portal; both come from the same newsroom system.

Changjiang Net is also the foundation on which the group built its better-known digital-native brand. On 23 September 2015, the new media platform Jiupai News, created by the Changjiang Daily Newspaper Group, was officially launched from Wuhan. Jiupai has its own profile as a national-facing platform, but its existence shows what the group's digital infrastructure made possible: a municipal newspaper group, rooted in a 1949 party daily, using its portal, app and social accounts to launch entirely new forms of news publishing.

Organisation

The organisation behind Changjiang Net is the Changjiang Daily Press Group — also rendered as the Changjiang Daily Newspaper Group and, in its company form, Changbao Media Group. The group is the owner and publisher of the Changjiang Daily, and its leadership roles combine party-committee, presidential and board functions in the manner typical of Chinese municipal media groups. Its headquarters at the Changjiang Media Building on Jinqiao Avenue in Jiang'an District place it in Hankou-side Wuhan, north of the Yangtze, close to the Wuhan Citizen Home area served by the Houhu Avenue metro station on Line 3.

That structure — an official newspaper, a press group formed around it in 2003, a portal carrying its name in network form, and business divisions spanning government communication and digital projects — is the standard organisational shape of a large Chinese city media group in the digital era, and Changjiang Net is the public-facing layer through which most readers now encounter it.

Audience and Reach

The core audience is Wuhan's population of over 11 million, and within it the institutional readership the Changjiang Daily has always served: enterprises, government agencies, schools and intellectuals. Those readers use the portal for the authoritative version of city news — policy announcements, official notices and the group's reporting — in a media market where the same events are also covered by provincial media, national media and commercial platforms. Changjiang Net's claim on their attention is proximity and authority combined: no national portal can out-report the city paper on Wuhan, and no commercial city site carries the official standing of the municipal committee's own newspaper group.

Beyond the city, the portal serves Hubei readers looking to the capital, Yangtze-basin readers following the river region, and a wider audience reached when Changjiang Daily reporting is syndicated nationally and internationally, as with the "Understanding China, Discover Wuhan" series carried through international distribution channels.

Role in Wuhan and Hubei Media

Hubei's media map has two levels in Wuhan itself. The provincial system, headed by the Hubei Daily and its Jingchu Net portal, speaks for the province. The municipal system, headed by the Changjiang Daily and Changjiang Net, speaks for the city. Changjiang Net's role is to hold the municipal level online: to be the first digital destination for Wuhan's official news, the home of the Changjiang Daily in digital form, and the platform from which the group experiments with new products such as Jiupai News.

Seventy-five years after Mao Zedong wrote its masthead at a Hankou address in the first week of the new Wuhan, the Changjiang Daily's name — now in its network form, Changjiang Net — still does the same job for the same city: recording how a conurbation of three historic towns at the meeting of two great rivers governs itself, builds, learns and lives, and publishing that record for the enterprises, agencies, schools and citizens who make up its readership.