About Da Ji Yuan

Da Ji Yuan

Overview

Da Ji Yuan, in Chinese 大纪元, rendered in full as Da Ji Yuan Shi Bao, is the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times and the group's original publication. It was first published in Chinese in New York in May 2000, with its web launch in August 2000, founded by John Tang, a Georgia Tech doctoral student, and other Chinese-American Falun Gong practitioners who initially worked from an Atlanta basement. The English-language Epoch Times came later, online in 2003 and in print in 2004, so the familiar direction of media expansion is reversed here: the Chinese edition is the parent, and the English and other-language editions are its descendants. By 2003 the Epoch Times website and newspaper group had grown into one of the largest Chinese-language news sites and newspaper groups outside China, with local editions in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and major Western European countries. The Chinese edition has been described as the single largest Chinese-language newspaper in the world, covering 35 countries. Its websites are blocked in mainland China, and its most famous publication, the "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party" of November 2004, became the centrepiece of the Tuidang movement urging renunciation of the Chinese Communist Party.

This profile concerns Da Ji Yuan itself, the Chinese-language newspaper and website, rather than the English Epoch Times, which is profiled separately in this directory. The distinction matters because the group's history, its defining editorial campaign and its largest early audience were all Chinese-language phenomena, created for Chinese readers inside and outside China at a moment when the Chinese state had banned Falun Gong and controlled every newspaper published on the mainland.

Founding in 2000

The Epoch Times was founded in 2000 by John Tang and other Chinese Americans affiliated with the Falun Gong movement. Tang was a graduate student in Georgia at the time and began the newspaper in his basement; reference accounts date the founding to 20 May 2000, record the first Chinese publication in New York in May 2000 and the web launch in August 2000, and place the founders' earliest work in Atlanta. The immediate context was the Chinese government's campaign against Falun Gong, begun in 1999. Practitioners in the United States found American and international coverage of the persecution limited and Chinese-language information dominated by Beijing's account, and they set out to build a Chinese-language newspaper that would report the persecution and provide uncensored news about China to Chinese readers abroad and, through the internet, at home.

The name itself is a statement in Chinese. Da Ji Yuan means, in effect, "the great era" or "the epoch," and the full masthead, Da Ji Yuan Shi Bao, is the Chinese name that the English "Epoch Times" translates. Starting in Chinese also shaped the organisation's skills: its first reporters, editors and distributors worked in Chinese, served Chinese immigrant communities with free and low-cost papers, and built the web operation that by 2003 scholar Yuezhi Zhao could describe, in words quoted on Wikipedia's Epoch Times entry, as one of the largest Chinese-language news sites and newspaper groups outside China.

Growth into a global Chinese newspaper group

The expansion was rapid. By 2003 the group had local editions across the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and major Western European countries. Later descriptions recorded offices in some 30 countries, publication in numerous languages on the web and in print, and total weekly circulation figures above a million, with the Chinese editions accounting for the largest share, a weekly circulation of about 1.1 million recorded in one contemporary account and a New York-area Chinese weekly circulation of 105,000 cited by TheFreeDictionary's encyclopedia summary and FACTS.org.cn. Da Ji Yuan was described in those sources as the single largest Chinese-language newspaper in the world, a claim that rests on its combination of multi-country local editions under one Chinese masthead, something no mainland newspaper, confined by its domestic system, and no single-city diaspora paper could match.

Distribution followed the geography of the Chinese diaspora. Free papers in the Chinatowns and suburbs of New York, Toronto, Sydney, London and other migration hubs put Da Ji Yuan into the hands of readers who had left China, Hong Kong and Taiwan and who wanted news of China in Chinese from a source outside Beijing's control. Hong Kong held a special place in the system as the one Chinese city where the paper could print openly at scale near the mainland, which is why the events of 2005 there, described below, mattered to the whole group. The parent organisation, Epoch Media Group, is headquartered in New York City, in Midtown Manhattan in current descriptions, and also operates New Tang Dynasty Television, the group's television arm.

The Nine Commentaries

On 19 November 2004 Da Ji Yuan began publishing the "Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party," a series of nine editorials assessing the Chinese Communist Party's history and character. The editorials argued that China would not be free or prosperous until it was rid of the party, which they said was at odds with China's cultural and spiritual values. They were published first in the Chinese edition, a fact recorded in the book edition's foreword and in the Australian Refugee Review Tribunal's 2011 country advice on China, which noted that the Commentaries first appeared on 19 November 2004 in Daijiyuan, the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times, and that they had been banned in China, though no official proclamation of the ban had been found in English-language sources.

The Commentaries became the centrepiece of the Tuidang movement, the campaign urging people to quit, or renounce, the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated youth organisations. The Epoch Times said that more than two million people had resigned in the campaign's early period, and later accounts by the paper reported far larger cumulative figures; a contemporary report recorded the paper's claim of more than 18 million renunciations by the time of its 2006 top-stories list. A report by the OpenNet Initiative found that 90 percent of websites mentioning the phrase "Nine Commentaries" were blocked in mainland China as of 2005. China scholar David Ownby has written about the Commentaries as a significant text of the Falun Gong milieu. Whatever a reader's assessment of the editorials or of the renunciation counts the movement publicises, the series is the defining publication in Da Ji Yuan's history: the moment its Chinese-language pages produced the text around which an international political campaign organised itself.

Blocking, pressure and the Hong Kong printer episode

Da Ji Yuan's relationship with China has been defined by exclusion. The Epoch Times websites are blocked in mainland China, as is the wider web presence of the group, so the Chinese edition reaches mainland readers only through circumvention, through print copies carried across borders and through republication. Hong Kong, where the paper published openly, showed the pressures available even outside the mainland's firewall. In May 2005 the Hong Kong edition, then publishing five days a week with a circulation of 50,000, faced closure after its printer served notice in March that it would stop printing the paper. The paper's chief editor in Hong Kong, Amy Chu, told The Standard that a dozen other printing firms had been contacted and all had refused. A spokesman, Chan, said he believed the printers had come under political pressure after the Nine Commentaries series criticised the mainland, that printers had said they were scared, and that the paper feared for press freedom in Hong Kong. The episode is recorded here as the paper's stated account at the time; it documents, at minimum, that in 2005 Hong Kong's largest-circulation Falun Gong-affiliated paper could not readily find a commercial printer willing to handle it.

These pressures are integral to understanding the outlet rather than incidental to it. Da Ji Yuan was created because its founders judged that no existing Chinese-language channel would carry their reporting; blocking in China, the filtering of its signature phrase documented by OpenNet, and printing difficulties in Hong Kong are the continuing forms of the condition it was founded to circumvent. Its distribution system, free diaspora papers, a global website network, editions in 35 countries, is the organisational answer to that condition.

Relationship to Falun Gong and to the English edition

Da Ji Yuan was founded by Falun Gong practitioners, is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement in the descriptions of major reference works, and covers the persecution of Falun Gong in China as a central subject. Its representatives have historically drawn distinctions about formal ownership: Stephen Gregory, chairman of the board for the English-language editions, told reporters in a contemporary account that the paper is not a Falun Gong newspaper, is not owned by Falun Gong and does not speak for it, while acknowledging that it covers the persecution. Both the affiliation described by scholars and reference works and the formal position stated by its own executives belong in a complete profile. What is not in dispute is the founding personnel, the movement origins of its sister outlets, Sound of Hope radio and New Tang Dynasty Television, the same trio of Falun Gong-founded media identified since 2005, and the editorial mission of opposing the Chinese Communist Party, which The Epoch Times states openly.

Within the group, the Chinese edition's seniority is a recurring theme. The first English edition launched online in 2003, followed by the first English print edition in 2004, years in which Da Ji Yuan was already a multi-country newspaper group. The group's later development, into an international multi-language newspaper and media company with websites accessible from 35 countries and publication in many languages, grew outward from the Chinese core. When the English Epoch Times achieved separate prominence in American politics, it did so as the younger sibling of a Chinese newspaper founded in a Georgia basement in 2000, and this directory's separate profiles preserve that order: Da Ji Yuan as the original, the English edition as a distinct, later outlet.

Content and editorial character

Da Ji Yuan publishes general news, China news, world news, business, culture, health and commentary in Chinese, using staff reporters, freelancers and wire material, the staffing model recorded in contemporary profiles of the group. Its China coverage is its signature: reporting on human rights, religious persecution, official corruption, social unrest and the internal politics of the Communist Party, presented from an openly oppositional standpoint, alongside a large volume of mainstream news of the kind any general newspaper carries. Contemporary observers noted that the end product includes a great deal of mainstream news while the China coverage is strident and critical. Its cultural coverage promotes traditional Chinese culture as the founders understand it, a theme it shares with its sister outlets, positioning the paper as a custodian of a pre-Communist Chinese tradition as well as a news source.

For researchers, the paper's value and its caveat are the same fact. It has published information about China, especially about Falun Gong's persecution and about elite politics, that appeared nowhere else in Chinese at the time, and some of its reporting has been borne out; it is also an avowedly partisan participant in the conflict it covers, and its claims, from renunciation totals to exclusive political reports, require the corroboration any advocacy source requires. A directory profile records both, because its readers in 35 countries encounter Da Ji Yuan as one of the few global Chinese newspapers, and they are entitled to know both its scale and its standpoint.

Current status and significance

Da Ji Yuan continues as the Chinese-language flagship of the Epoch Media Group, publishing at epochtimes.com and its Chinese-language web addresses, printing local editions in diaspora markets and remaining blocked in mainland China. Its significance in Chinese media history is secure on the documented facts alone: founded in May 2000, it became within three years one of the largest Chinese-language news operations outside China; it published the Nine Commentaries on 19 November 2004 and built the Tuidang campaign around them; it sustained a claimed position as the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the world by geographic reach; and it served as the founding platform from which an international media group, including the English Epoch Times and NTD Television, developed. No other Chinese-language newspaper created by exiles and immigrants in the internet era has matched that combination of longevity, reach and political consequence, which is why Da Ji Yuan is catalogued here in its own right, as the original publication, and not merely as a language version of an English title.