About Chongqing Daily

Chongqing Daily

Chongqing Daily (重庆日报, Chongqing Ribao) is the official newspaper of the Chongqing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the flagship title of the Chongqing Daily Newspaper Group. It is a Chinese-language daily published in Chongqing, the vast directly administered municipality of southwestern China on the upper Yangtze. The modern paper was founded on 5 August 1952, built on the foundation of the Chongqing edition of Ta Kung Pao, and its masthead was written by Deng Xiaoping, then secretary of the CCP's Southwest Bureau, who also wrote it a congratulatory inscription: "Developing production and linking town and country is the central task of urban work." It holds the first registration number in its province-level series, CN50-0001, with postal distribution code 77-1, is supervised by the Propaganda Department of the Chongqing Municipal Committee and edited and published by the Chongqing Daily Newspaper Group. The group it anchors now runs an all-media system of newspapers, apps and international communication platforms reaching far beyond the printed page.

An Earlier Paper of the Same Name

The title Chongqing Daily had a life before 1952, and the two papers should not be confused. In October 1904 the democratic revolutionary Bian Xiaowu founded a newspaper called Chongqing Daily at Maijia Courtyard, Fangjia Shizi, in Chongqing — opposite the site of today's Chongqing Hotel. That Qing-dynasty Chongqing Daily, published from 17 October 1904 until it was suppressed on 1 June 1905 after Bian's arrest, is remembered in Chongqing press history as the city's earliest daily to preach democratic revolution: a single-sheet paper at first, growing from its eighth issue to four pages, printed on one side in a format approaching the modern newspaper. Chongqing also holds a place in the wider history of early Chinese newspapers: local chronicle accounts credit Song Yuren with founding the city's first modern newspaper there in the late 1890s. The 1952 paper invokes this inheritance of the name, but institutionally it is a creation of the People's Republic, founded on a different newspaper's plant and staff.

Founding in 1952 on the Foundation of Ta Kung Pao

After 1949, the great independent newspaper Ta Kung Pao — founded in Tianjin in 1902 and publisher of a Chongqing edition since the war years, when Chongqing was China's wartime capital — passed under Communist Party control, and its regional editions were reorganised. Its Tianjin and Shanghai editions were merged and moved to Beijing; its Chongqing edition became Chongqing Daily. The new paper was formally founded on 5 August 1952. Deng Xiaoping, the senior party leader in the southwest, personally wrote the paper's masthead and contributed the congratulatory inscription quoted above, tying the paper's mission to the economic tasks of the new order: production, and exchange between city and countryside. Chinese reference accounts emphasise the distinction this gave the title: Chongqing Daily is described as the only provincial-level party newspaper whose name was inscribed by Deng Xiaoping himself.

The founding settlement lasted. Through the decades in which Chongqing was administered as part of Sichuan province and then, from 1997, as a directly administered municipality in its own right, Chongqing Daily remained the organ of the city's — then the municipality's — party committee: the authoritative daily through which Chongqing's leadership addressed its public.

Role as the Municipal Party Paper

As a provincial-level party daily, Chongqing Daily's functions mirror those of its peers in Beijing, Shanghai and the provinces: it publishes the municipal committee's decisions and documents, reports the leadership's activities, sets the interpretive line on major events for other Chongqing media, and provides the city's official record. Its political weight is visible in small bibliographic facts: it carries registration CN50-0001, the first number issued in Chongqing's series, and its supervising authority is the municipal committee's Propaganda Department. Internationally, the paper is part of the documented record of the Chinese press: it is listed among Chongqing's regional newspapers in the standard list of newspapers in China, and it is among the Chinese newspapers included in Princeton University's Apabi newspaper database coverage for 2020–2025, through which researchers outside China read it.

Chongqing gives the paper an outsized brief. The municipality is a province-sized territory of mountains and river cities along the Yangtze and the Jialing, and its daily must speak simultaneously to a dense metropolitan core and to far-flung districts and counties. That geography shaped both its historic distribution — group accounts describe a delivery network advancing by rail, road, water and air — and its later digital strategy of apps and county-level media partnerships.

Building the Chongqing Daily Newspaper Group

On 18 October 2001, with the approval of the Central Propaganda Department, the Chongqing Daily Newspaper Group was formally established, built with Chongqing Daily at its head — in the group's formula, the Daily as the "dragon head" of a party newspaper group. The grouping had been assembling since 1998, as the Daily's organisation successively received five transferred newspapers. The resulting structure was described as "eight newspapers and one website": Chongqing Daily as the lead title, together with Chongqing Evening News, Chongqing Morning Post, Chongqing Economic Daily, Consumer Guide, Health People's News, the Sports News and New Woman's News, plus the Hualong (CQNEWS) website. The group also supervises and publishes Hongyan Chunqiu (Red Rock Spring and Autumn), a journal founded in 1989 devoted to the history associated with Chongqing's revolutionary "Red Rock" heritage.

The group grew into one of the largest media employers in southwest China. A widely reported 2015 account of the group's response to the digital crisis in print put its workforce at more than 6,000 employees and its 2014 profit at 200 million yuan (about 32 million US dollars) — figures that convey both the scale the group had reached and the size of the adjustment the internet era would demand of it.

Sister Titles: Morning, Evening and Commercial Papers

Three sister titles define the group's popular reach. Chongqing Morning Post, the city's first morning newspaper, was officially inaugurated on 28 April 1995. Its lineage runs through the Daily's own rural publishing: its predecessor was Chongqing Daily: Rural Edition, founded in 1983, renamed Chongqing Rural Post on 1 October 1986, which ceased publication in 1994 before relaunching as the Morning Post in 1995. It is sponsored by the Chongqing Daily Newspaper Group and supervised by the municipal Propaganda Department, and it has maintained a special section in Singapore's Lianhe Zaobao — a small but telling mark of Chongqing media's outward connections.

Chongqing Evening News was founded by the group in May 1985. In 2004 it expanded to more than 24 pages, sharply increasing local coverage such as its "Complaints Investigation" and "Eyewitness News" features, and operated a dual-track distribution system combining postal subscription with self-run delivery. Chongqing Commercial Daily — a separate title from Chengdu's paper of the similar name — was founded in 1997 as a popular comprehensive metropolitan paper for Chongqing readers within the same group. Together with the Daily itself, these titles gave the group a morning, evening, commercial and party-paper presence across the whole Chongqing reading day.

Digital Beginnings: CQNEWS and Hualong Net

The group's digital flagship came early. CQNEWS.net was established on 20 December 2000 with the approval of the State Council Information Office as a provincial-level key news website for Chongqing, under the direction of the municipal Propaganda Department. It described itself as Chongqing's only website holding news interviewing rights, and it became the online home of the group's newspapers. In 2009 CQNEWS was merged with CBN.cn in a reorganisation involving the Chongqing Daily News Group, Chongqing Broadcasting Group and the municipal state-owned cultural assets company. Its English service introduced the operation as "Chongqing's first portal news website," combining newspaper, radio, television, mobile-phone news and social media, and carrying seven digital newspapers including Chongqing Daily, Chongqing Evening News, Chongqing Morning Post and Chongqing Commercial Daily.

The Hualong Net operation, which began in 2000 as the platform carrying the group's newspapers online, was Chongqing's first online news medium with interviewing rights and one of the city's mainstream local websites. In a further reorganisation on 18 November 2024, Hualong Net was integrated with Chongqing Broadcasting Group's First Eye News operation, becoming a sub-brand within the "First Eye TV" media cluster — a sign of how Chongqing's newspaper and broadcasting digital assets are being consolidated into combined clusters.

Pressure and Experiment in the Print Decline

Chongqing Daily's group became a national talking point in May 2015, when it announced that all its employees were welcome to create start-ups in media convergence and internet fields: interested staff would sign three-year arrangements under which pay was suspended but positions and ranks retained, with the company offering publicity and financial support to ventures judged promising. The announcement was hotly discussed on Weibo and WeChat and was widely read — whatever the group's intentions — as a sign of the pressure on print. The context was stark: a Tsinghua University research report that month recorded a 15 percent decline in print advertising in 2014, leading groups elsewhere in China had reported profit falls of 37 and 56 percent, and some metropolitan papers had already closed. The episode makes Chongqing Daily's recent history a documented case study of how a large Chinese party newspaper group confronted the collapse of the print business model: not only by building apps, but by trying to convert its own workforce into digital entrepreneurs.

The Group Today: A "1+3+N" All-Media System

The group's current self-description organises its output as a "1+3+N" all-media communication system: the "1" is Chongqing Daily as the leading title; the "3" is a trio of head platforms — the New Chongqing client app, Upstream News, and the Western International Communication Centre; and the "N" is a set of specialised chains including Chongqing Evening News, Chongqing Morning Post, Chongqing Commercial Daily, Jinri Chongqing (Chongqing Today), Chongqing Rule of Law News, New Woman's News and Health People's News. The group states that it has won 56 China News Awards over thirteen consecutive years, including eleven first prizes, placing it in the front rank of provincial party newspaper groups — a claim that, if taken at face value, reflects the Daily's continued investment in prize-level journalism alongside platform building.

Recent national recognition supports the picture of an organisation still investing in content and technology. In October 2026 the National Press and Publication Administration's sixth China Newspaper Industry Innovation Development Cases list included three Chongqing Daily group cases: the Daily's in-depth commentary WeChat account "Chongqing Outlook," noted for addressing hot issues and social pain points from a governance perspective; the group's "Chongbao Zhimei" intelligent media platform, a technical base organising news gathering, business management and office systems with a full "plan, gather, edit, review, publish, feedback, control" chain; and an international-communication project reshaping wartime memory around the returned documentary film Kugan ("China's Ordeal"). The group's earlier honours include the Daily's selection, in 2018, for the 2017 national Top 100 Newspapers list.

Significance

Chongqing Daily condenses three eras of Chinese journalism into one title. It inherited the plant of Ta Kung Pao, the most famous independent newspaper of Republican China, in the wartime capital that paper had fled to. It was christened by Deng Xiaoping with a mission statement about production and town-country exchange that belongs wholly to 1952. And it now fronts a media group experimenting with intelligent production platforms, international communication centres and staff start-ups. Through all three eras it has remained what it was founded to be: the official daily of Chongqing's party committee, carrying registration number CN50-0001 and the record of a municipality whose scale — a province in all but name, astride the Yangtze — makes its paper of record a significant national as well as local source.