About Changzhi Television

Changzhi Television

Overview

Changzhi Television (Chinese: 长治电视台) is the prefecture-level television station of Changzhi, a city in southeastern Shanxi province, China. It is run by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now part of the Changzhi converged media centre. Its main channel provides news, public affairs and livelihood programming in Mandarin across the prefecture.

Changzhi is the ancient Shangdang region, a highland territory enclosed by the Taihang Mountains to the east and the Taiyue range to the south. It is a coal and equipment-manufacturing base, a farming region of mountain valleys, and hallowed ground in China's revolutionary history: the Eighth Route Army made its headquarters in these mountains during the war against Japan. Industry, agriculture and 'red' heritage together define the station's beat.

Shangdang, the highland region

Shangdang — the name means the highland heights — has been a strategic territory since antiquity, a defensible upland between the North China Plain and the Shanxi plateau, fought over by states and armies for two thousand years. Changzhi city, its centre, preserves the Shangdang Gate and other relics of its past as a regional capital, and the prefecture's very terrain — ridges, gorges and basin farmland — shapes its settlement and its stories.

The prefecture administers districts and counties including Lucheng, Xiangyuan, Tunliu, Changzi, Huguan, Licheng, Wuxiang, Qinyuan and the county-level city of Luzhou's namesake districts — a wide mountain territory the station must knit together in its coverage.

The Eighth Route Army years

During the War of Resistance against Japan, the Taihang Mountains of Changzhi were a core base area of the Eighth Route Army, whose headquarters stood for a long period at Wuxiang, in the prefecture's north. The great Eighth Route Army Taihang Memorial Hall at Wuxiang, covering some 180,000 square metres, presents that history in exhibition halls, a generals' gallery and memorial grounds, and draws visitors from across China.

At Huangyadong in Licheng County, the army built its largest arsenal in the north China base areas, a munitions factory hidden in a cliff valley. These sites anchor 'red tourism' in Changzhi, and the station's coverage of anniversaries, memorial events and the visitors who retrace the army's mountain routes is a major strand of its cultural and news output.

The Shangdang Campaign

Changzhi's mountains saw the first great battle of the renewed civil war: the Shangdang Campaign of 10 September to 12 October 1945, in which Eighth Route Army forces under Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping defeated the attempt by Yan Xishan's troops to seize the Shangdang base area. Communist forces drawn from the Taihang, Taiyue and southern Hebei districts, supported by tens of thousands of militia, retook Changzhi and its surrounding counties in a campaign whose captured equipment and ammunition materially strengthened their armies for the War of Liberation.

The campaign is a set-piece of the prefecture's remembered history, retold in its museums and media. For Changzhi Television it belongs to the same heritage brief as the memorial hall: a local landscape in which national history was decided.

Coal and equipment industry

Changzhi is one of Shanxi's significant coal producers and an equipment-manufacturing base, with large mining groups operating across its counties and machinery and related industries in the city. Energy and industrial news — output, safety, investment and employment — is a core part of the station's journalism, speaking to the many families the mines and factories support.

As in the rest of the Shanxi coal country, transition runs alongside production: cleaner coal use, new materials and equipment upgrading, and the development of tourism and agriculture as counterweights. The station tracks that rebalancing county by county.

News and public affairs

The main channel's bulletins cover the municipal government, prefecture development and county affairs from the city to the mountain townships. Public-affairs programming addresses the governing questions of a resource prefecture: mine-area environment and land restoration, water in a dry upland region, roads through difficult terrain, and public services across scattered mountain communities.

Taihang geography makes infrastructure a permanent story — tunnels, mountain highways and rail links that bind Shangdang to the plain and the provincial capital are followed closely, as are the weather and flood risks of the mountain valleys.

Livelihood and mountain agriculture

Livelihood programming serves the city districts and the farming counties: consumer and public services in town; agricultural coverage in the valleys, where the prefecture grows grain, millet and medicinal herbs, keeps livestock, and has built speciality industries from walnuts to donkey products in different counties. Seasonal farming, rural incomes and rural revitalisation projects are regular subjects.

Mountain agriculture has its own calendar and hazards — drought, hail, early frost — and the station's weather and farming information is a practical service on which county households rely.

Taihang scenery and tourism

The Taihang Mountain Grand Canyon in Huguan County, with its red-rock gorges — Hongdou Gorge, Qinglong Gorge and their waterfalls and pools — is the prefecture's scenic flagship and a growing visitor draw. Tourism coverage follows the canyon, the red-heritage route through Wuxiang and Licheng, and the cool mountain summers that market Shangdang as an escape from the plain's heat.

Tourism is also economic strategy: counties once dependent on coal and farming are building visitor industries, and the station's features present those landscapes to audiences beyond the prefecture while informing local development debates.

Culture and heritage programming

Cultural output weaves the prefecture's three threads: the ancient Shangdang inheritance of gates, temples and old towns; the red heritage of the Taihang base area, in documentary and anniversary programming; and the folk culture of the mountain valleys — local opera forms such as Shangdang bangzi, temple fairs and village festivals.

That mixture is the prefecture's identity, and television is its main stage: performances, memorial ceremonies and scenic features give Changzhi a screen presence that expresses what the place believes itself to be.

The converged media centre

Changzhi Television now operates within the city's converged media centre, the merged organisation for the prefecture's press, broadcasting and new media. Television journalism feeds the centre's digital platforms, carrying Changzhi's news, red-heritage features and Taihang scenery to audiences far beyond the prefecture — including the national online audience for revolutionary history and mountain tourism.

The main channel remains the prefecture's broadcast service of record, while the shared newsroom serves the digital audiences among whom younger Changzhi residents now live.

The station broadcasts in Mandarin across the Changzhi prefecture — the urban districts, industrial and mining communities, county towns and mountain villages of Shangdang. Its schedule follows the local day and year: evening news at the centre, farming seasons and heritage anniversaries marking the calendar.

Scheduled television's core audience is older and home-based; the converged centre's apps and accounts carry the same reporting to younger viewers and to Changzhi people working outside Shanxi.

Place in Shanxi's media landscape

Changzhi Television is the local tier of Shanxi's media system for the southeastern prefecture, beneath the provincial broadcaster in Taiyuan. Its territory combines heavy industry, mountain agriculture and some of the most significant revolutionary sites in China — a combination that gives its news and cultural programming a distinct weight.

In daily practice it performs the prefecture station's standard role, executed across difficult and beautiful terrain: the news, services and memory of Shangdang, for the people of Shangdang.