About City Times

City Times

City Times (都市时报, Dushi Shibao) is a Chinese-language metropolitan newspaper published in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, China. It is the market-oriented city paper of the Kunming Daily Press — the newspaper house that also publishes Kunming Daily, the Kunming Municipal Party Committee's organ — and it has covered the provincial capital's city life, society, property and consumer news since 1999. City Times was created at the height of China's metropolitan-newspaper boom, when every large Chinese city acquired a brash commercial morning paper of its own; in Kunming it entered a market in which six such papers competed at once. Its website is times.clzg.cn.

Created from three papers in 1999

City Times was assembled, not founded from nothing. In early 1999 the Kunming Daily Press merged three of its existing publications — Dushi Weekend (City Weekend), Baixing Shenghuo (People's Life) and Minzu Wenhua Bao (Ethnic Culture News) — into a single new metropolitan daily, City Times, which was issued on 18 January 1999. The launch was famously lean: its start-up capital was only 200,000 yuan, the smallest investment of any newspaper newly launched in Yunnan at the time, and its circulation in its first year was around 30,000 copies. From those beginnings it grew into the Kunming Daily Press's commercial flagship, the paper through which the municipal party paper's house competed for advertising and street sales against the provincial press group's titles.

The metropolitan newspaper idea

The genre City Times belongs to — the dushi bao, or "city newspaper" — had begun only four years earlier. China's first city newspaper is generally identified as Huaxi Dushi Bao (West China City News), launched in Chengdu on 1 January 1995 by the Sichuan Daily publishers, which demonstrated that a commercially driven paper reporting researched local stories, rather than reprinting party directives, could win a mass urban readership. Imitators followed in every major city, staffed by a new generation of journalists, and by the end of the decade the format — morning publication, tabloid energy, heavy service, consumer and social news — had become the standard popular paper of urban China. Kunming, preparing to host the 1999 World Horticultural Exposition with a two-year programme of overpasses, hotels and rebuilding that transformed the city, was fertile ground for it.

Six city papers in one capital

City Times did not have the Kunming market to itself. When Kunming Daily's new paper was formally launched in the spring of 1999, the city counted six comprehensive metropolitan newspapers competing for the same readers and advertisers: City Times itself; the Yunnan Daily Press Group's Chuncheng Evening News (Spring City Evening News) and Dianchi Morning News; the Yunnan Information News, relaunched that March in partnership with Chengdu Shangbao; and the Donglu Times, supervised by the provincial party committee's external publicity office, among them. Few provincial capitals sustained so crowded a field, and the competition defined Kunming journalism in the 2000s: the papers fought over exclusives, price and distribution across the Spring City's newsstands. Consolidation in later years thinned the field, but City Times endured as the municipal house's entry.

The rivals: an evening paper and an upstart

The competition had distinct characters. The Yunnan Daily Press Group's Chuncheng Evening News, founded on New Year's Day 1980 as Yunnan Daily's evening paper, was the province's largest-circulation city paper and its most-read title in the capital: market research in Kunming found 68.6 per cent of the city's residents had read it in the previous year, with an average per-issue readership above 40 per cent. The Yunnan Information News, relaunched in March 1999 with Chengdu Shangbao as partner, announced itself that May when, after the bombing of China's embassy in Belgrade, it alone among Kunming's papers abandoned routine coverage for several full pictorial pages on the story — the kind of gesture the metropolitan format existed for. City Times, the municipal house's entry, competed against both a provincial giant and a nationally backed upstart, which makes its survival as Kunming's second media house's flagship the more creditable.

The Kunming Daily Press

The paper's publisher, the Kunming Daily Press, is a public institution under the Kunming Municipal Party Committee whose formal functions, as set out in its published departmental accounts, are to publish and distribute Kunming Daily, City Times and the press's other periodicals and new media, and to carry out the news publicity and public-opinion work assigned by the municipal party committee and government. The scale of the house is visible in its 2019 accounts: an authorised establishment of 235 staff, with 429 people working at the press at the end of that year including contract employees — the municipal counterpart to the larger Yunnan Daily Press Group across the city. Within that house, the division of labour is the classic Chinese one: Kunming Daily carries the party committee's authoritative voice, while City Times carries the commercial, reader-facing brief. The parent title has its own long history, which City Times inherits: Kunming Daily began as Kunming Bao, trialled from 1 October 1957 and formally founded on 1 January 1958; it was suspended on 1 February 1961 under a central directive that provincial-capital city papers should in principle cease, revived in the 1980s, and relaunched as a daily broadsheet under the Kunming Daily name on 1 October 1989 — a decade before it created City Times as its answer to the metropolitan age.

What City Times covers

City Times is Kunming's city paper in the literal sense: municipal government and services as they affect residents, social news, the property market, consumer affairs, education, health, traffic and the everyday economy of a provincial capital of several million people. Kunming's particular character shapes the brief — a plateau city at about 1,900 metres marketed on its spring-like climate, the flower trade centred on Dounan, the Dian Lake waterfront, and its role as China's gateway city for South and Southeast Asia, the "regional international central city" of municipal policy. The paper's name promises the city (dushi) and the times (shibao): a daily chronicle of a capital that has rebuilt itself repeatedly within the paper's own lifetime, from the Expo transformation of 1999 to the metro lines and lakefront redevelopment of the following decades.

Print and digital

City Times publishes in print and online, its digital home at times.clzg.cn within the Kunming Daily Press's web presence, and its content circulates through the press group's news platforms and social accounts. Like its competitors, it has lived through the migration of Chinese city-paper readerships from the newsstand to the phone: the metropolitan dailies that once fought over morning street sales now fight over push alerts and short video, and the converged newsroom of the Kunming Daily Press produces for both its titles across platforms.

City Times today

A quarter-century after its 200,000-yuan launch, City Times remains Kunming's municipal metropolitan daily: born in January 1999 from the merger of three Kunming Daily Press titles, raised in a six-paper street fight for the Spring City's readers, and still the commercial voice of the Kunming Daily Press beside the party organ Kunming Daily. Its history is a compact record of the Chinese city newspaper itself — invented in Chengdu in 1995, multiplied across the country by 1999, and matured, in Kunming as elsewhere, into the digital era.