About China Archives News

China Archives News

China Archives News (Chinese: 中国档案报; pinyin: Zhongguo Dang'an Bao) is a Chinese-language newspaper published in Beijing as the organ paper of the National Archives Administration of China. It is the specialist voice of China's archival profession and the main trade paper for the archives system nationwide. Read by archivists, records managers and historians, it covers archives law and policy, the work of national and local archives, records management, archival digitisation and preservation technology, and the historical documents held in Chinese repositories. It also reports exhibitions, newly opened files and research drawn from archival holdings, connecting the daily work of a large professional system with the documentary heritage that system holds in trust.

The organ paper of the National Archives Administration

In China's press system, an organ paper is the authoritative newspaper of the institution it serves, and China Archives News performs that role for the national archives administration. Wikipedia's account of the National Archives Administration of China lists "China Archives Newspaper" among the administration's affiliations, alongside the China Archives Press, the Archives of Science and Technology Institute, an archival cadres and education centre and Chinese Archives magazine. That cluster matters for understanding the newspaper: it sits inside a small publishing and training apparatus whose job is to speak to, and for, the archival profession, rather than to compete for general newsstand readers. Its authority comes from proximity to the regulator and administrator of the system it covers.

The administration behind the newspaper

The National Archives Administration is the national administrative agency responsible for historical records of the state dating back to imperial times in China. It was established in November 1954, as a national agency subordinated to the State Council. The agency also concurrently holds records for the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and is therefore also known as the Central Archives. In 1993, the national archives and central archives functions were merged into one unified agency, operating two archives — one for the state and one for the ruling party. Its child agencies include the First Historical Archives of China and the Second Historical Archives of China, and its official website is saac.gov.cn. The administration's collections are described as including more than 800,000 records and more than 80 million items of information in documents, records, files and manuscripts relating to important political figures. A newspaper attached to such an institution reports on a system that is simultaneously an arm of modern administration and the custodian of records stretching back through the imperial past.

What the newspaper covers

The candidate record for China Archives News describes a beat that follows the whole life of a record. At one end is law and policy: the rules governing how archives are collected, arranged, protected and used, and the supervision of that work. In the middle is professional practice — the work of national and local archives, records management inside government bodies and institutions, preservation technology, and the digitisation programmes that are converting paper holdings and creating born-digital records. At the other end is the content of the archives themselves: exhibitions, newly opened files and historical research drawn from archival holdings. That combination — regulation, practice and historical content — is characteristic of a sector organ. Its readers do not simply want news about archives; they need the policy interpretation, technical guidance and professional exchange that allow archives across a very large country to work to common standards.

Reporting the Archives Law and its 2021 revision

No subject illustrates that role better than the Archives Law of the People's Republic of China. The law was first adopted on 5 September 1987, amended in 1996 and 2016, and comprehensively revised at the 19th Meeting of the Standing Committee of the Thirteenth National People's Congress on 20 June 2020, with the revised law taking effect on 1 January 2021. The revised text runs to 53 articles. It applies to the collection, arrangement, protection and use of archives and to the supervision of those activities; it defines archives broadly as historical records in forms including writing, pictures, diagrams, audio and video, directly created by state organs, groups, enterprises, public institutions, other organisations and individuals; and it charges the national archives administration with overall planning, organisation and coordination of archival work nationwide. The revision added a dedicated chapter on the informatisation of archives, addressing the circumstances of the big-data era, and a Regulation on the Implementation of the Archives Law followed in 2023. For the archival profession, explaining such changes — what they require of repositories at every level — is core work for its organ paper.

National and local archives in its pages

Below the national administration sits a layered system of national repositories and local archives at and above county level, which the law describes as cultural institutions for the centralised management of archives, responsible for collecting, arranging, preserving and providing access within their respective remits. China Archives News reports the work of that system: how local archives implement national policy, how they build and describe their holdings, and how they serve users. Its pages are where a county or provincial archive's experience can become a reference for peers elsewhere in the country, and where national meetings, standards and campaigns are communicated to the front line of the profession. A documented example of the profession's national mobilisation is the contest on the Archives Law organised by the State Archives Administration through the newspaper "China Archives" to mark the law's 15th anniversary in 2002, which an International Council on Archives account records as drawing responses from more than 500,000 people.

The historical archives: Ming, Qing and Republican records

Much of the historical reporting in the paper concerns the two great central repositories under the administration. The First Historical Archives of China, in Dongcheng District, Beijing, was originally established in 1925 and is responsible for archives of central government agencies of the Ming and Qing dynasties and earlier dynasties; it holds about 10 million historical documents, the majority of them Qing dynasty records. It opened to the public in its new venue in July 2022, offering access to more than 4.68 million archival documents, with more than 4.1 million archives available for public retrieval on its official website and exhibitions including documents selected for the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. The Second Historical Archives of China, in Nanjing, was established in February 1951 and collects and manages archives of central government agencies during the Republic of China period, from 1912 to 1949 — including the Nanjing Provisional Government, the Beijing government and the Nanjing Nationalist Government — and held more than 2.58 million volumes as of 2024. Together the two institutions give the newspaper a historical beat of unusual depth, from imperial records to the archives of the Republican era.

Opening archives to the public

Access policy is another recurring theme. In July 2022 the National Archives Administration introduced new guidelines on the disclosure of archives to the general public, effective 1 August 2022, setting out principles, circumstances and procedures for disclosure and for public access and use. Individuals and organisations with proper credentials can access disclosed archives on site or through virtual channels including websites and email. Under the Archives Law enacted in January 2021, foreign individuals and organisations enjoy equal rights to access disclosed archives in China as Chinese citizens and organisations, and the separate guidelines that had governed their activities were abolished; disclosure remains subject to laws and regulations on national security. The theme is visible in practice as well: in July 2025 China's Central Archives opened more than 57,000 documents to the public to mark the 80th anniversary of victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, including more than 40,000 items chronicling the resistance period from September 1931 to September 1945. Announcements and explanations of such openings are exactly the kind of authoritative system news an organ paper exists to carry.

Digitisation and electronic archives

The fastest-changing part of the beat is digital. On 17 February 2023 the National Archives Administration announced that China would accelerate the construction of digital archives at the national level, reporting that 26 new digital archives at the national level had been set up in 2022. It said archives should follow the cutting edge of information technology and adopt a working pattern in line with Digital China, smart cities and smart government services, with more resources coordinated for regions facing difficulties in funds and technology. The legal framework moved with the technology: the revised Archives Law specifically addresses electronic archives, giving them the same legal standing as traditional paper-based archives, and the administration has issued management measures covering the archiving, transfer, storage and use of electronic files, aimed at ensuring authenticity, integrity, usability and security. In 2022 the administration also launched a nationwide archival search platform and a mobile app, which has since connected with 2,196 national archives at various levels; and in August 2023 the State Council's General Office promoted electronic archiving of government-service documents, with electronic documents archived online in real time and, as a rule, no longer archived on paper. Each of these steps changes daily practice in repositories across China — and each requires the explanation and professional discussion that China Archives News provides.

Documentary heritage and the Memory of the World

The newspaper also speaks for China's documentary-heritage work. UNESCO launched the Memory of the World Programme in 1992 to guard against collective amnesia and to preserve valuable archive holdings and library collections. China established its Chinese National Committee for the programme in 1996 and created a national-level documentary heritage register in 2000 — described by the Renmin University Memory of the World Beijing Knowledge Center as the world's first national-level register of its kind. The National Archives Administration is the leading institution for this work in China, and since the first Chinese documentary heritage was inscribed on the international register in 1997 it has organised the inscription of 13 documentary heritages, including the Documents of the Nanjing Massacre, the Compendium of Materia Medica, the Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon and the Qiaopi and Yinxin correspondence and remittance documents of overseas Chinese. A concrete trace of the newspaper's role survives in that record: an article on the Chinese Memory of the World Committee hosted by the Renmin centre notes that it was originally published in China Archives News, Issue No. 3164, front page, on 4 January 2018. The national register itself has continued to grow: in June 2025 a sixth batch of 52 archival documents — paper records, stone inscriptions, bamboo slips and woodblock printing plates among them — brought the total on China's documentary heritage list to 250.

Readership and significance

China Archives News is read by archivists, records managers and historians — a professional readership, not a mass one, but a readership spread through every level of a nationwide system. Its significance lies in that position. It is the channel through which the National Archives Administration's policies, standards and campaigns reach the profession; the forum in which local archives report practice and preservation technology is discussed; and a chronicler of the historical holdings — imperial, Republican and modern — that Chinese repositories preserve. In a period when the Archives Law has been comprehensively revised, electronic records have gained equal legal standing, and national digital archives are being built at speed, the archives system's own newspaper is the record of how a profession responsible for the state's memory is adapting to a digital age.