About Dahe Net

Dahe Net

Dahe Net, published at dahe.cn, is the online news portal of the Henan Daily Media Group in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan in central China. It brands itself in English as "the first brand of local news website in Henan," a strapline carried across its English edition at en.dahe.cn, and it functions as the group's general web gateway: Henan and national news, the digital presence of the group's newspapers, and — increasingly — the base from which Henan's provincial media conduct international communication. The name Dahe, "Great River," is shared with the group's famous metropolitan title, Dahe Daily, and refers to the Yellow River, the great river of the Central Plains whose history is inseparable from Henan's. Behind the portal stands one of China's oldest provincial party media organisations, founded in 1949, and a newspaper group formally established in 2000.

Roots in Henan Daily, founded in 1949

The group's flagship, Henan Daily, was founded on 1 June 1949 in Kaifeng, formed by merging Yuxi Daily into Kaifeng Daily as the official newspaper of the Henan Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, with its Chinese title written by Mao Zedong. It is described in reference works as the most authoritative daily newspaper in Henan. In 1954 the paper's editorial office moved from Kaifeng to Zhengzhou, the new provincial capital, where the group remains headquartered at No. 28, East Section of Nongye Road. In 2000 the Henan Daily Press Group was formally established, and Henan Daily became a member of it.

That group is Dahe Net's institutional home. Reference summaries of Henan Daily record that the newspaper has formed a comprehensive media system covering print media, online media, mobile media and outdoor media — and dahe.cn is the online component of that system, the address at which the group's journalism, announcements and services meet web readers. As with other provincial party groups, the transfer of authority is the point: the website's standing with readers and officials rests on the flagship paper's position as the province's authoritative voice, a position now more than seventy-five years old.

The Dahe name and Dahe Daily

The Dahe brand became famous across Henan through print. Dahe Daily, a comprehensive urban lifestyle newspaper, was founded by Henan Daily on 1 August 1995, originally named Dahe Wen Hui Bao and officially renamed Dahe Daily on 1 October 1997, with the stated aim of concerning itself with people's livelihood, promoting fashion, getting close to life and serving the public. Based in Zhengzhou, it grew into one of the most representative media brands in the province. Its daily circulation was 600,000 in 2003, ranking sixteenth in China and ninety-ninth in the world, and reached one million copies in 2006.

At its height the paper produced eighty pages a day in four volumes — sixty-four pages of national edition and sixteen pages for the provincial capital — and built sub-publications including Dahe Wealth, a financial weekly, Dahe Digest and Dahe Health. Its distribution reached across Henan through more than three hundred distribution sites. This is the brand equity that dahe.cn carries online: for many Henan readers, "Dahe" meant the lively metropolitan paper on their doorstep long before it meant a website, and the portal's English strapline, "the first brand of local news website in Henan," deliberately extends that print claim into the digital market.

What Dahe Net publishes

As the Henan Daily Media Group's portal, Dahe Net publishes Henan news in depth — provincial government and party activity, the life of Zhengzhou and the province's prefectural cities, economy, agriculture, culture and social news — alongside national and international coverage for its home audience. Its English edition organises that coverage into recognisable channels, including Focus, Gallery, National and city pages such as Zhengzhou, and mixes provincial stories, from archaeological training courses in Luoyang to new transport projects in the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone, with national wire coverage and features on Henan's opening-up, its Belt and Road role and its cultural heritage, from Shaolin kung fu and Taijiquan to the province's ancient capitals.

The portal also serves as the web home of the group's titles: the digital editions of Henan Daily and its sister papers, including the Henan Business Daily, are published under the dahe.cn domain at addresses such as newpaper.dahe.cn. That arrangement — one domain carrying the flagship site, the newspaper e-papers and the English service — makes dahe.cn the single point of entry to the group's output, and the archive against which the group's published record can be checked.

First in Henan to communicate internationally

Dahe Net's most significant recent role is in international communication. Its own English reporting describes dahe.cn as "the first provincial-level media in Henan to do international communication" and one of the leading forces in building the Henan International Communication Center (HICC). The HICC was established on 21 June 2023 in Zhengzhou and is, in that reporting, currently the only provincial-level international communication medium in Henan, created to strengthen Henan's voice in international affairs and better present Henan culture to the world.

The centre pooled international communication resources from across the group and its partners — Henan Daily, Dahe.cn, Top News, Dahe Daily, Henan Mobile News and Today Consumer among them — to develop the "HiHenan" flagship brand and build what it calls a "1+1+N+X" publicity matrix. It has signed strategic cooperation agreements with sixteen overseas Chinese media. That a website, rather than the print flagship, is named as a leading force in building the centre marks how far dahe.cn's role has expanded: from republishing the group's news online to originating the province's outward-facing media strategy.

Working with Zhengzhou University

The international role has an academic dimension. On 16 November 2023, the Henan International Communication Center and the School of International Studies of Zhengzhou University held a signing ceremony at the university for a co-built practice base and expert appointments. The ceremony was organised by Dahe.cn. The partnership connects the centre's "HiHenan" work with the university's foreign-language and international-studies expertise — the talent and translation capacity a provincial media organisation needs if it is to publish credibly for foreign audiences rather than simply translate domestic releases.

Henan's broader translation effort gives that work context. The province's "Translating Henan" project, launched in the first half of 2018, produced the bilingual series "Chinese Civilization · Stories From Henan," whose first ten volumes — covering traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese characters, agriculture, ancient capitals, Shaolin kung fu, Taijiquan, the Hongqi Canal, Jiao Yulu, the Silk Road and handicraft — were compiled by a team of more than three hundred Chinese and foreign language experts from ten cities and eighteen universities. Dahe.cn reported and promoted that project to its own international audience, an example of the portal acting as the distribution layer for Henan's cultural communication as a whole.

A group still winning journalism honours

The journalism behind the portal continues to be recognised nationally. When the results of the 31st China Journalism Awards were announced on 7 November 2021, four works from Henan won, and media affiliated with the Henan Daily Newspaper Group won three of them. Awards of that kind matter to a portal's profile because dahe.cn is where much of the group's awarded work reaches its largest audience, and because they demonstrate that the group's newsrooms — whose output the portal aggregates — remain competitive at national level, not merely authoritative at provincial level.

The group's brands have also adapted to newer formats. Reporting on the launch of the "Dahe Selection" live e-commerce project in October 2021 recorded that Dahe News's short-video and social accounts — its Douyin accounts and official Weibo among them — had together passed ten million followers, its WeChat public account approached one million, and the Dahe brand had been selected among China's 500 Most Valuable Brands for eighteen consecutive years, with a brand valuation exceeding 18 billion yuan in 2021. Those figures belong to the wider Dahe brand family rather than to dahe.cn alone, but they describe the ecosystem in which the portal now operates: a web gateway feeding, and fed by, large social and video audiences.

Dahe Net and Henan's story

Dahe Net's coverage priorities mirror the story Henan tells about itself: a primary breadbasket province becoming an emerging industrial province, a traditional transport hub becoming a modern one, and an inland province becoming an inland open highland, in the formulation provincial leaders have used in Beijing briefings carried by the site. Its English pages dwell on Zhengzhou's role as a national central city and hub for rail, air, high-speed rail, power, mail and telecommunications; on the Zhengzhou–Luxembourg "Aerial Silk Road"; and on cultural assets from Millennium City Park in Kaifeng, built around the Qingming scroll, to the archaeological sites of the early Xia dynasty. A reader following en.dahe.cn receives Henan's development narrative from Henan's own media, which is precisely the function the province built the HICC, with dahe.cn at its centre, to perform.

Dahe Net today

Today Dahe Net continues to operate at dahe.cn from Zhengzhou as the Henan Daily Media Group's online news portal, with its English edition at en.dahe.cn still carrying the strapline "the first brand of local news website in Henan." Its documented record combines a 1949 party-newspaper inheritance, the province's best-known metropolitan newspaper brand, a comprehensive print-online-mobile media system, national journalism awards, and a leading role in the provincial international communication centre established in 2023. Few Chinese provincial websites can show a comparable spread of functions. For Henan readers, dahe.cn is the group's front door; for foreign readers following the HiHenan brand, it is increasingly the place where Henan introduces itself.