About Dandong Television

Dandong Television

Overview

Dandong Television (Chinese: 丹东电视台) is the television service of Dandong, a prefecture-level city in southeastern Liaoning province, and one of the oldest local television operations in China. It broadcasts today as part of Dandong Radio and Television Station, the merged municipal broadcaster formed in 2013 from Dandong Television and Dandong People's Radio. The station's television line-up consists of a News Comprehensive Channel and a Life Channel, broadcasting in Mandarin to a city whose life is defined by its position on the Yalu River, directly opposite Sinuiju in North Korea.

Few prefecture-level stations anywhere in China can match the depth of Dandong's broadcasting pedigree. Its television service began trial broadcasts in 1960, when television in China was barely two years old, and its radio inheritance reaches back to 1945. That long history, and the border-city beat it serves, gives Dandong Television a character unlike any other station in Liaoning.

A television pioneer: trial broadcasts in 1960

Dandong Television began trial broadcasts on 29 April 1960. The date is recorded in the Liaoning provincial gazetteer's broadcasting and television volume, which identifies the station as one of the earliest prefecture-level city television stations in mainland China. China Central Television's predecessor, Beijing Television, had only launched in 1958, and provincial and municipal stations were still rare; for a border city in Liaoning to be experimenting with television at the start of the 1960s placed Dandong in the first generation of Chinese local broadcasting.

The service developed through the following decades. On New Year's Day 1980, Dandong Television achieved colour television broadcasting, in step with the national transition from black-and-white to colour production. On 1 December 1994, Dandong Cable Television was merged into Dandong Television, consolidating the city's wired and wireless television operations in a single station — the same pattern of consolidation that swept Chinese local television in the 1990s as cable networks were folded into municipal stations.

The radio inheritance from Andong

The merged broadcaster's radio lineage is older still, and unusually dramatic. In September 1945, after the Northeast Democratic Allied Army entered the city — then called Andong — the new Andong municipal government took over the Andong Broadcasting Bureau of the Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Company and established a municipal station, later renamed the Andong Xinhua Broadcasting Station with the call sign XTAK. During the renewed civil war, the station at one point moved across the river to Sinuiju to broadcast, before returning to Andong in 1947 under the leadership of the Liaodong provincial party committee.

In April 1949 the station became Andong People's Radio, and on 25 March 1951, on the instructions of the central and northeastern broadcasting authorities, it was renamed Liaodong People's Radio. When Liaodong and Liaoxi provinces were merged into Liaoning in August 1954, that provincial station was abolished; the Andong party committee and government decided on 31 August 1954 to found a new Andong People's Radio, which began broadcasting on 1 September 1954. In March 1965, when Andong was renamed Dandong, the station took the name Dandong People's Radio — the name it carried into the 2013 merger.

The merged station of 2013

In 2013, Dandong People's Radio and Dandong Television were merged to form Dandong Radio and Television Station, bringing the city's radio and television services under one management. The merger followed the nationwide pattern of the period, in which separate radio and television stations were combined into single broadcasters as a step towards converged, multi-platform local media.

For Dandong the merger joined two institutions with complementary histories: a radio service whose roots lay in the revolutionary broadcasting of the 1940s, and a television service that had been on the air, in trial form, since 1960. The combined station inherited both traditions, together with the cable operation absorbed in 1994.

Channels and frequencies today

Dandong Radio and Television Station's television offer comprises two channels. The News Comprehensive Channel is the flagship, carrying the city's news, current affairs and feature programming. The Life Channel serves everyday and lifestyle content for the prefecture. Both broadcast in Mandarin.

On radio, the merged station operates a Comprehensive Broadcast on FM 103.6 MHz and AM 1404 kHz, and a Traffic Broadcast on FM 101.7 MHz and AM 891 kHz, serving drivers and travellers in a city that is a major crossing point and transport hub for the lower Yalu. The station's web presence has operated as the Dandong Radio and Television Network.

Television for a border city

Dandong is China's largest border city, set on the north bank of the Yalu River opposite the North Korean city of Sinuiju. That geography shapes its television in ways no inland prefecture station experiences. Border trade, cross-river affairs and the daily life of a frontier community are standing subjects for its newsrooms, alongside the municipal news, public affairs and livelihood programming common to Chinese prefecture television.

The river itself is the city's defining image. The Sino-Korean Friendship Bridge carries road and rail traffic between the two countries, while a short distance away the Yalu River Broken Bridge — severed during the Korean War and preserved as a historic site — ends mid-river. Both structures are fixtures of the city's visual identity and recurring subjects in local reporting and features.

Korean War memory

Dandong was the principal Chinese crossing point of the Korean War, known in China as the War to Resist US Aggression and Aid Korea, and the city preserves that memory in its memorial halls and monuments. Local television coverage of anniversaries, commemorations and veterans' stories forms part of the station's heritage remit, connecting its journalism to the most consequential chapter in the city's modern history.

The connection is more than ceremonial for the broadcaster itself: its own radio predecessor spent part of the civil-war years broadcasting from Sinuiju, and the post-1949 station grew up in a city whose fate was bound up with the peninsula across the river. Border history is, for Dandong Television, also institutional history.

The city on screen

Beyond border affairs, the prefecture's economy and landscape supply the station's regular coverage. Dandong is known for its strawberries and for seafood from the northern Yellow Sea, for river tourism along the Yalu, and for a hinterland of counties and county-level cities under its administration whose agriculture and small industries fill out the local news agenda.

Programmes in Mandarin serve the prefecture's districts and counties, mixing bulletins from the city government with livelihood reporting — markets, weather on the river, fisheries, harvests and festivals — of the kind that prefecture-level television across China exists to provide, but which in Dandong is always coloured by the presence of an international frontier a few hundred metres from the studio's city.

Why Dandong Television matters

Dandong Television matters first as a survivor from Chinese television's founding generation: a prefecture station trialling broadcasts in 1960, switching to colour in 1980, absorbing its cable rival in 1994 and merging with its radio sibling in 2013. Its institutional biography mirrors, in miniature, the whole history of local broadcasting in the People's Republic.

It matters second for where it stands. No other Chinese city television station broadcasts from a major land frontier with North Korea, in sight of the far bank. That vantage point — part municipal newsroom, part window on a closed neighbour — makes Dandong Television one of the most distinctive local broadcasters in the country, and its News Comprehensive and Life channels the everyday screen record of life on the Yalu.