About Donews

Donews

Donews, published at donews.com, is a Beijing technology news site founded in April 2000 by Liu Ren. It is widely regarded as China's first IT news community: before it was a news site in the modern sense, Donews was the Donews IT writing community, a real-name forum where the founders, executives, journalists and commentators of China's young internet industry gathered to argue, publish and meet. Its early influence was out of all proportion to its size — later accounts call it the Whampoa Military Academy of Chinese internet editors and journalists and describe it as China's internet barometer — and its sale to the Qianxiang Group in 2005 placed it inside one of the defining Chinese internet groups of its era. Donews remains a long-running Chinese tech-industry news brand, and its directory record lists its home as Beijing, China, and its official website as donews.com.

Founding in April 2000

Donews was founded in April 2000, in Beijing, at the moment China's commercial internet was taking shape — the year of the Nasdaq listings of China's first portal generation and of intense argument about what the Chinese internet would become. Its founder, Liu Ren, was a journalist rather than a technologist, and the product he built reflected that: not a portal of republished press releases but a community of writers. Accounts of Donews describe it as China's first blogging community as well as its first IT news community, and both descriptions point at the same innovation — giving named industry insiders a place to publish columns and debate each other in public, years before social media made that ordinary. The site's Chinese internet-history importance begins with that founding choice: Donews treated the internet industry itself as a beat, and the industry's own participants as its authors and its audience at the same time.

Liu Ren, China's first IT reporter

Liu Ren was known, in the phrase repeated across profiles of him, as "China's first IT reporter". His reputation rested on a distinctive interviewing method built on observed detail: lecture notes of his on interviewing and writing, circulated from 2008, insist on asking for concrete detail and on watching the small things — expressions, gestures, timing — that reveal how a corporate event actually unfolded, and he applied that method to figures at the centre of Chinese technology, including Lenovo's leadership at the time of the company's split. Within the early Beijing internet world centred on Zhongguancun, Liu Ren's standing was social as well as professional: retrospective accounts describe him moving among the industry's leading founders, able to dine with the era's best-known executives, and Donews's year-end gathering functioning as an annual event for the whole sector. The community and the founder were inseparable in this period — Donews's authority came substantially from Liu Ren's personal network, which is also why its later history turned so sharply on his own fortunes.

The writing community model

The early Donews was remembered by its members for three main functions: a bulletin-board forum, a columns section, and a built-in chat tool remembered as "Fast Cow". Membership of the forum was by real name: registration required administrator approval before a user could post, and participants wrote under their own identities. That single rule shaped everything about the community's character. Because the posters were identifiable executives, investors and journalists, the forum functioned as a semi-public room of the Chinese internet industry itself — a place where a reader could encounter the genuine views, and even the contact details, of famous founders who at the time were otherwise visible only in magazine profiles. The columns gave the same community a publishing outlet, and the chat tool kept conversation running between posts. Alumni accounts describe the cumulative effect in social terms: people met friends and co-founders there, and unknowns became industry names there, in a community that combined an online forum with the real-world relationships of a small, fast-growing industry concentrated in Beijing.

Gathering place of early internet China

Donews's offline rituals matched its online reach. Before its acquisition, the site held an annual gathering — remembered as the Donews Congress — that drew its nationwide membership to Beijing in such numbers that, in one oft-retold anecdote, NetEase founder Ding Lei travelled from Guangzhou only to be stuck in the crowd at the door. Retrospective coverage lists the era's defining Chinese internet figures among the participants in Donews's world: Zhou Hongyi, Cai Wensheng, Chen Yizhou and others appear in accounts of its circle, and its year-end party is described as attended by figures including Robin Li, Kai-Fu Lee and Ma Huateng. The judgements later writers passed on that period are consistent: that Donews gathered the people who were building the Chinese internet, that it was called the Whampoa Military Academy of internet editors and journalists — a reference to the academy that trained a generation of Chinese officers — and that media of the time called it China's internet barometer, the instrument by which the industry's weather could be read.

Sale to the Qianxiang Group in 2005

In 2005 Liu Ren sold Donews to the Qianxiang Group — the group whose name is also rendered Thousand Oaks, and whose operating company became Oak Pacific Interactive — the Beijing internet group built by Chen Yizhou. Accounts of the transaction record Liu Ren's own terms as he described them: he took one third of the consideration in cash and put the remaining two thirds into Qianxiang as an investment, preferring a stake in the group's future to a complete cash exit. The sale moved Donews from founder ownership into a portfolio that came to include some of China's best-known community properties, among them the Mop community and the campus social network that became Renren. For Donews itself, group ownership brought resources but changed its nature: the fiercely independent, founder-centred community became one brand among several inside a group whose centre of gravity was shifting towards social networking, and later alumni writing about the site contrasts the early community atmosphere with the more commercial portal it gradually became.

A difficult later chapter

Donews's history cannot be honestly told without its founder's fall. Retrospective reporting records that in 2008 Liu Ren was arrested in a case involving Qihoo 360 — whose founder Zhou Hongyi had once been close to him — on suspicion of commercial extortion connected to paid public-relations demands, and that he was imprisoned for three years; the episode, reported by Southern People Weekly and retold in later profiles, caused a sensation in Beijing's IT and internet circles at the time and was described as a twist that nearly killed Donews. The facts matter to this profile for one reason: they mark the end of the founding era. The community's authority had always rested on Liu Ren's personal standing, and his removal from the scene, together with group ownership and the migration of industry conversation first to blogs and then to social platforms, ended Donews's period as the Chinese internet's central meeting place. The site continued — as the following sections record, it continued for a long time — but as a technology news brand rather than as the industry's parliament.

Donews, Duoniu Media and Renren

The corporate thread of Donews runs forward in an unexpected direction. Later accounts of the Renren social network's sale explain that Duoniu Media, which acquired Renren from Renren Inc. for 60 million dollars in a transaction announced in November 2018, had Donews as its predecessor: reporting on the deal notes that Duoniu Media's predecessor was Donews, that Donews was a website under the Thousand Oaks Group, and that the group's founder was Chen Yizhou, Renren's chief executive. In other words, the community Liu Ren founded in 2000 became, through its years inside Chen Yizhou's group, part of the corporate lineage that eventually bought back one of China's pioneering social networks. That lineage is the clearest surviving evidence of Donews's institutional importance: brands that were merely fashionable do not reappear, eighteen years after founding, in the structure of a 60-million-dollar acquisition.

What Donews publishes

As a publication, Donews settled into the role its name announces: a Chinese technology news site, based in Beijing, covering the internet and IT industries — the companies, products, people and deals of the sector it originally convened as a community. Its coverage is that of a long-established trade outlet for Chinese technology: industry news and company reporting from Beijing's position at the centre of China's internet business, published at donews.com for readers who follow the sector professionally. The transition is common among pioneering online communities — the forum becomes a newsroom, the members become the subject matter — but Donews made it earlier than almost any comparable Chinese site, and the masthead's continuity from 2000 gives its present-day technology coverage a historical weight that newer tech media cannot claim. Its directory classification, accordingly, is as an online news outlet for China, filed under Beijing.

Standing and significance

Donews's significance is foundational. Founded in April 2000 by Liu Ren, the reporter remembered as China's first IT journalist, it was China's first IT news community and one of its first blogging communities — the real-name room in which the founding generation of the Chinese internet argued in public, trained its editors and journalists, and held its annual gatherings. Its 2005 sale to the Qianxiang Group absorbed it into the corporate world its community had covered, its founder's 2008 imprisonment closed its heroic period, and its corporate descendant Duoniu Media's 2018 purchase of Renren closed a remarkable circle back to Chinese social networking's first era. That the site still publishes technology news from Beijing at donews.com, more than two decades after its founding, makes it one of the longest-lived brands in Chinese internet media — and for historians of that media, the first address at which the Chinese internet talked about itself.