About Chengdu Evening News

Chengdu Evening News

Chengdu Evening News (Chinese: 成都晚报; pinyin: Chengdu Wanbao) was a Chinese-language newspaper published in Chengdu, Sichuan, by the Chengdu Daily Newspaper Group. Founded on 1 May 1956, it began as a daily and became an evening paper in 1961 under press and publication rules; until 2001 it served as the organ of the Chengdu Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party before that role passed to the Chengdu Daily, after which it was one of the group's three main papers alongside the Chengdu Daily and the Chengdu Business Daily, focused on livelihood news. It announced its closure on the front page of 27 March 2019 and published its last issue on 30 March 2019.

Founding and early decades

The paper was founded on 1 May 1956 in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan in China's southwest. It began life as a daily newspaper and, in March 1961, was converted into an evening paper in line with a central propaganda-department rule governing the format of local papers. For the first forty-five years of its existence it carried a formal political status beyond that of a city paper: it was the organ newspaper of the Chengdu Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the official voice of the party in the provincial capital, a role it held from its founding until 2001. That dual identity — official organ and, increasingly, a paper read for everyday city life — defined its first era.

From party organ to livelihood paper

In 2001 the organ role passed to the Chengdu Daily, and the Chengdu Evening News was repositioned within what became the Chengdu Daily Newspaper Group. The group had three main papers: the Chengdu Daily as the party organ, the Chengdu Business Daily as its commercially formidable business and metropolitan title, and the Chengdu Evening News as a mainstream paper built around people's-livelihood news — the housing, prices, schools, hospitals, transport and neighbourhood stories that fill the daily life of a large city. The repositioning reflected the standard division of labour in Chinese press groups of the period, in which the organ carried authority, the business paper carried advertising weight, and the evening paper carried closeness to readers' daily concerns.

Chengdu and its newspaper market

Chengdu was one of the crucibles of modern Chinese newspaper competition. It was in Chengdu that Sichuan Daily's publishers launched Huaxi Metropolitan News on 1 January 1995, the paper generally credited as China's first "city newspaper" — a commercial metropolitan daily reporting local matters researched by its own journalists — and the model was widely imitated across the country. The Chengdu Evening News, four decades old by then, thus spent its later years in one of China's most competitive and innovative press markets, in a city whose readers had been offered aggressive commercial journalism earlier than almost anywhere else in the country. Its answer was continuity and livelihood coverage rather than the louder metropolitan style of its younger rivals.

The June 4 advertisement incident of 2007

The paper's most internationally reported episode came on 4 June 2007, the eighteenth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. In the classified advertisements, at the bottom right of page fourteen, there appeared a short advertisement paying tribute — in the wording preserved in the Chinese Wikipedia account, "salute to the strong mothers of the June 4 victims". According to Hong Kong's South China Morning Post, as summarised in that account, the advertisement had been accepted by a young female employee recently out of school who knew nothing of the June 4 incident and who, when she asked the advertiser what it referred to, was told it concerned a mining accident. On 8 June the Chengdu municipal propaganda authorities decided to dismiss the paper's executive deputy editor, Li Shaojun, and two editors over the incident.

Reactions and interpretation

Outside China the advertisement was read as a deliberate act of remembrance slipped past the censors. Global Voices, translating the EastSouthWestNorth blog's rendering of an article by a veteran worker at the paper explaining how the thirteen-word advertisement had made its way into print, reported the worker's view that the affair was a planned "prank" reflecting public sympathy for the victims of June 4 and respect for the mothers who had lost children. Whatever the intention of the person who placed it, the incident demonstrated both the sensitivity of the anniversary in Chinese media management and the vulnerability of a large newspaper's classified-advertising workflow, in which a short paid notice, handled by a junior employee, could carry a message the paper's editors would never have passed.

The long decline of print

Like the other titles in its group, the paper spent its final decade under the pressure that was dismantling China's commercial press. The China Media Project's survey of the closures describes how metropolitan and evening papers launched or sustained in the print-advertising boom were undermined from the mid-2010s as advertising and readers moved to digital platforms such as WeChat; closures, at first of coastal and big-city titles, spread to city and prefectural papers across the country. Evening papers were especially exposed: their franchise had been the printed summary of the day, a function that mobile news made redundant. Chengdu's group, like others, concentrated its future on its strongest brands and digital operations.

Closure in March 2019

On 27 March 2019 the paper used its own front page to address its readers directly, announcing that it would cease publication on 30 March. The last issue appeared on that date, closing a run of almost sixty-three years. The newspaper agency itself was formally dissolved later, on 5 November 2020, completing the institutional winding-up. The closure was reported as part of the same national pattern in which party press groups retired secondary titles: the organ and the flagship commercial paper continued, while the historic evening title — no longer the group's organ since 2001 and no longer its commercial engine — was let go.

Assessment

The Chengdu Evening News had an unusually long and varied life for a Chinese city paper. It served successively as a founding-era daily, an evening paper by central directive, the official organ of a provincial capital's party committee for forty-five years, and a livelihood-focused mainstream title inside a modern press group. Its history touches the main themes of post-1949 Chinese journalism: the party-organ system, the metropolitan revolution that began in its own city in 1995, the tight management of sensitive anniversaries — exposed by the 2007 advertisement affair — and the digital-era contraction that ended so many titles between 2016 and 2019.

Legacy

The paper is remembered in Chengdu as one of the three historic titles of the city's press group and, internationally, for a single page-fourteen classified advertisement in June 2007 that became one of the best-known censorship stories of its decade. Its run from 1956 to 2019, preserved in the group's archives and in press histories, stands as the record of how a party organ of the 1950s adapted — through format change, loss of organ status and repositioning toward readers' daily lives — to survive into the twenty-first century, and of the limits of that adaptation once print economics collapsed.

The name itself had an earlier life in the city: a wartime Chengdu Evening News (成都晚報) was published in Chengdu from 1943 to 1949, a run preserved in historic newspaper collections in some 1,958 issues. That paper was a product of the Republican-era press and had no institutional continuity with the 1956 title, but the shared name is a reminder that Chengdu, as Sichuan's publishing centre, had supported an evening-paper tradition long before the People's Republic — a tradition the 1956 paper inherited in form, if not in lineage, and carried for more than six decades.