About Dushi.ca

Dushi.ca

Dushi.ca, known in Chinese as 都市网, is a Canadian Chinese-language news and information portal operated by Sing Tao Media Group Canada and headquartered in the Toronto area, at Markham, Ontario. Sing Tao's own media profile describes dushi.ca as launched in 2009 and as a leading informative website for mainland Chinese immigrants, publishing up-to-the-minute news, health, lifestyle and entertainment news in Simplified Chinese characters, with an associated WeChat channel established in 2015 pushing Toronto and national news, shopping deals and leisure information. It is the group's Simplified-Chinese digital portal, editorially and linguistically distinct from singtao.ca, the group's Traditional-Chinese site aimed principally at Cantonese-speaking Canadians and launched in 2000. Dushi.ca exists because Canada's Chinese community changed: the Mandarin-speaking, mainland-born readership needed a portal of its own.

The Operator: Sing Tao Media Group Canada

Sing Tao Media Group (Canada), or STMG, is a Chinese-language media group based in Toronto, with its head office at Suite 201, 25 Royal Crest Court, Markham, Ontario. It offers digital and social media marketing, radio broadcasting, magazine publishing, events management and e-commerce to Chinese Canadians. The media brand began in Canada in 1978 as a Hong Kong-owned Chinese-language newspaper; at its peak it published the largest Chinese-language newspaper in Canada, with print editions in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary, before the print editions ceased publication on 28 August 2022 in a pivot to digital media. Today it is described as the largest Chinese media group in Canada, reaching a community of 1.7 million nationwide. Since 2023 it has been jointly owned by a private Canadian corporation and the Hong Kong-based Sing Tao News Corporation; previously, between 1998 and 2023, it was jointly owned by Torstar Corporation — publisher of the Toronto Star — and Sing Tao News Corporation. Dushi.ca is one product inside that structure: the group's portal for the mainland immigrant audience.

Why a Simplified-Chinese Portal: Canada's Changing Chinese Community

Dushi.ca's existence is explained by immigration history. For decades Canada's Chinese-language media served mainly Cantonese-speaking immigrants from Hong Kong, and Sing Tao's own flagship site, singtao.ca, launched in 2000 in Traditional Chinese characters for Cantonese-speaking Canadians, reflects that era. Marketing commentary from as early as 2000 noted that the face of the Chinese market in Canada was changing dramatically: where most Chinese newcomers had been Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong immigrants, the majority were becoming Mandarin-speaking immigrants from mainland China and Taiwan, with Mandarin speakers representing some 85 per cent of new Chinese immigrants settling in Toronto in 1998 in the figures then cited. A Simplified-Chinese portal, launched in 2009, was Sing Tao Canada's answer: dushi.ca addressed the mainland-born reader in the script and register of mainland China, with content framed for newcomers — hence Sing Tao's own description of it as a leading informative website for mainland Chinese immigrants, rather than as a general newspaper site.

Content: News, Health, Lifestyle and Entertainment

Sing Tao's 2023 company profile defines dushi.ca's content compactly: up-to-the-minute news, health, lifestyle and entertainment news, in Simplified Chinese. That mix distinguishes it from the group's flagship. Where singtao.ca carries the full newspaper inheritance — up-to-the-minute news, finance, sports and lifestyle across three local versions for Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary in Traditional Chinese — dushi.ca is an informative portal for settlement and daily life: news a newcomer needs, health information, lifestyle guidance and entertainment, written for readers whose reference point is mainland China and whose immediate questions are Canadian. The group's wider content machine stands behind it: Sing Tao Canada describes itself as having set the standard in news coverage, lifestyle, entertainment and social participation for the Chinese Canadian community, and its journalists' work has been recognised nationally — Sing Tao Canada won the inaugural Special Topic Award at the Canadian National Newspaper Awards in 2024 and was a finalist for the same honour in 2025.

The WeChat Channel, Established 2015

Dushi.ca's distribution extends beyond the website. Sing Tao's media profile records an associated channel under the dushi.ca brand established in 2015, carrying local news for Toronto and national news, shopping deals and leisure information. Contemporary listings of the group's digital properties place that channel on WeChat, the platform through which much of the mainland-born community in Canada consumes news and community information. The 2015 channel date matters: it shows the portal adapting, six years after launch, to the platform shift that moved mainland Chinese audiences worldwide from websites to WeChat subscription accounts. Together, website and channel made dushi.ca a two-surface property — a searchable, linkable portal, and a push channel delivering Toronto and national news in Simplified Chinese to subscribers' phones.

Dushi.ca Within the Sing Tao Digital Family

Sing Tao Media Group Canada has evolved, in its own description, from a traditional newspaper publishing company into a multi-channel media group serving the growing Chinese Canadian community through newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasting, websites, mobile apps, social media, e-newsletters and e-commerce channels. Its digital family includes singtao.ca, described by partners as one of the largest news websites in Canada with more than 33 million monthly page visits reported in 2022 collaboration announcements; dushi.ca; and ccue.ca, through which online and mobile marketing opportunities are sold. Its other arms include Sing Tao A1 Chinese Radio in Toronto, established in 2008 and broadcasting more than 70 hours of Mandarin and Cantonese programming per week on AM 1540, and magazines including the bilingual luxury lifestyle magazine EliteGen and a paid weekly magazine for first-generation Chinese Canadians. Within that family, dushi.ca holds the Simplified-Chinese, mainland-immigrant brief — complementary to, not duplicative of, the Cantonese-oriented flagship.

The Print-to-Digital Pivot Around It

Dushi.ca was digital from birth, but the group around it was not, and the group's transformation frames the portal's significance. When Sing Tao Daily's Canadian print editions ceased on 28 August 2022, after more than forty years, management framed the move as a pivot to a more digital model, with journalism continuing online. The eastern edition's print operation had been substantial: a six-tower press installed in Markham in 2013 printed a five-section broadsheet daily whose readership was reported at around 200,000 copies per issue, plus weekly supplements and magazines. The audience that print once reached is the audience the group's websites — singtao.ca for the established Cantonese readership, dushi.ca for mainland newcomers — now serve between them. Dushi.ca, launched thirteen years before print ended, was an early piece of the digital structure that outlived the newspaper.

Research Attention and Community Standing

Canadian research into Chinese-language media treats the Sing Tao operation as a central case: Concordia University research on media framing and Hong Kong Canadians selected Sing Tao Daily as the oldest and most influential Hong Kong-founded Chinese newspaper in Canada, and Canada's foreign-interference inquiry research surveyed the country's Chinese-language portals, listing outlets such as Creaders and 51.ca among them. Dushi.ca's documented position is narrower and specific: it is the Simplified-Chinese portal of the country's largest Chinese media group, launched in 2009 for the mainland immigrant audience that demographic change had made the growth segment of Chinese Canada. Sing Tao's own 2023 profile — the source for the launch date, the content description and the WeChat channel — presents dushi.ca under the group's digital titles alongside singtao.ca, as one of the two pillars of its web presence.

Dushi.ca Today

Today Dushi.ca continues at dushi.ca as Sing Tao Media Group Canada's Simplified-Chinese news and information portal: up-to-the-minute news, health, lifestyle and entertainment for mainland Chinese immigrants in Canada, with its WeChat channel carrying Toronto and national news, shopping deals and leisure information. It sits inside the largest Chinese media group in Canada, headquartered in Markham, in a group whose history runs from a Hong Kong-owned newspaper founded in Canada in 1978 through the Torstar partnership years to the digital-only present. For this directory, Dushi.ca is the Toronto, mainland-audience entry among Canadian Chinese online news outlets — the portal a media group built when it recognised that Chinese Canada now speaks Mandarin and reads Simplified Chinese, and that serving it required not a translation of the old flagship, but a site of its own.