About Computer News (Diannao Bao)

Computer News (Diannao Bao)

Computer News, known in Chinese as Diannao Bao (电脑报, literally "Computer Paper"), is a Chinese-language weekly popular-computing newspaper published in Chongqing under the Chongqing Association for Science and Technology. Founded on 3 January 1992, it explained personal computers, software, games and the internet to a mass readership during China's PC boom, and reference listings of Chinese newspapers put its circulation at about 750,000 copies in 2007, making it one of the best-selling technology papers in the country. Written in a practical, tutorial style, it was a staple of newsstands and of school and office subscriptions across China — for a generation of Chinese users, the paper through which the personal computer became comprehensible.

Founding in Chongqing in 1992

Computer News was founded on 3 January 1992 in Chongqing, in China's southwest. Its institutional home is distinctive: it is published under the Chongqing Association for Science and Technology, the city's mass organisation for science and technology workers, rather than by a party newspaper group or a ministry. That parentage shaped the paper's mission — popular science applied to the newest of technologies. The date matters too. The paper appeared just as China's personal-computer market began its steep climb: computers were still expensive, largely institutional purchases in 1992, but prices were falling, clones and domestic brands were spreading, and within a few years the PC would become an aspirational household object. A weekly paper that taught readers what a computer was, which one to buy and how to use it was founding itself at the head of a wave.

Explaining the PC to a mass readership

The paper's editorial formula was explanation. Reference descriptions characterise its style as practical and tutorial: how-to articles, buying guidance, software instruction, troubleshooting and step-by-step introductions to new applications. This was journalism as user manual, written for readers who had often never touched the machines it described. During the 1990s that readership was everyone — teachers and students, office workers and officials, small-business owners and the young enthusiasts who would staff China's internet industry. By teaching the vocabulary of computing — operating systems, memory, modems, browsers — to a national audience in plain Chinese, Computer News performed a mass-education function that few publications in any country have matched at its scale.

Circulation and the newsstand era

The formula sold. Reference listings of Chinese newspapers put the paper's circulation at about 750,000 copies in 2007, making it one of the best-selling technology papers in China. At its height it was, as descriptions of the paper put it, a staple of newsstands and of school and office subscriptions across the country. Those two channels tell the story of its market: the street newsstand, where a weekly computer paper competed on its cover lines with newspapers and magazines for the casual buyer; and the institutional subscription, through which schools, universities, work units and computer rooms took the paper as a standing educational resource. A Chongqing-published weekly achieving three-quarter-million national circulation was competing successfully in a market dominated by Beijing titles — the Beijing IT press included the older China Computerworld and the CCID group's China Computer News, both aimed primarily at professionals — by serving the lay reader the professionals' papers did not address.

Software, games and the internet

The paper's subject matter followed its readers through the stages of Chinese computing. Personal computers came first: hardware, peripherals, assembly and purchase. Software followed — operating systems, office applications, utilities, Chinese input methods and the pirated and domestic software ecosystems of the 1990s. Games formed a major strand of its coverage, reflecting the place of PC gaming in China's computer culture, much of it mediated through internet cafés in the late 1990s and 2000s. Then the internet itself: dial-up access, browsers, email, portals, instant messaging and the online services that turned the computer from a standalone machine into a terminal. Each transition required the same tutorial service for a new cohort of beginners, and the paper renewed its readership with every wave.

A science-association paper

Publication under the Chongqing Association for Science and Technology placed Computer News within China's popular-science publishing system, whose mission is the public understanding of science and technology. The association is the Chongqing arm of the national science-and-technology association network, a people's organisation linking the scientific community with the public. For a computer paper, that home offered credibility and a degree of insulation from pure commerce: the paper was a popularisation project as well as a business. It also rooted the title in Chongqing rather than in the capital — an unusual geography for a national technology publication, and a point of civic pride in a municipality whose own newspaper market was famously competitive, supporting multiple big metropolitan dailies fighting circulation wars into the 2010s.

Readership: students, offices and enthusiasts

Its readers, as the paper's distribution suggests, were students, schools, offices and self-taught enthusiasts. The school and office subscriptions gave it a presence in computer classrooms and work-unit reading rooms; the newsstand sales reached the home user and the hobbyist. What united them was the need the paper existed to meet: reliable, structured, Chinese-language instruction in a technology that arrived faster than formal education could absorb it. Many Chinese IT professionals of the boom generation first encountered computing concepts in the popular technology press, and Computer News, at its circulation peak, was the largest-circulation title of that kind.

Place among China's computer papers

Chinese computing had a layered press. At the top stood the professional and trade titles of Beijing — China Computerworld, founded in 1980 and for a time the industry's most authoritative voice, and the CCID group's China Computer News, founded in 1985 for IT managers and vendors. Computer News occupied the popular tier beneath them, and by circulation it dwarfed the professional papers: its roughly 750,000 copies in 2007 represented a lay public for computing that had no parallel in the trade press. The distinction is the key to its history. It was not an industry paper that happened to be popular; it was a popular paper about an industry, and its tutorials, buying guides and games coverage were written for the user, not the vendor.

The end of the tutorial era

The conditions that created Computer News dissolved as computing matured. The beginner's questions the paper answered moved to search engines, forums, video tutorials and the help systems of the platforms themselves; the newsstand network that distributed it contracted across China in the 2010s; and the smartphone replaced the PC as the device a new user needed explained. Popular-computing papers everywhere faced the same contraction. What remains historically significant is the scale of the paper's achievement in its era: for roughly two decades a weekly from Chongqing taught a substantial fraction of urban China how to use a computer, at circulations most technology publishers worldwide could only envy.

Significance

Computer News (Diannao Bao) is significant as China's great popular-computing newspaper. Founded on 3 January 1992 under the Chongqing Association for Science and Technology, written in a practical tutorial style, and reaching about 750,000 copies in 2007 by reference listings, it brought personal computers, software, games and the internet to a mass readership during the PC boom, as a staple of newsstands and school and office subscriptions across the country. Its history marks the moment when computing in China stopped being a professional speciality and became a general skill — and when a science-popularisation weekly in a southwestern municipality could outsell the capital's professional press by explaining, patiently and in print, how the machines worked.