About Family

Family

Overview

Family, known in Chinese as Jiating, is a Chinese family magazine dating from 1982 and published in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province in southern China. Its content focuses on family life and children's education — a positioning that sets it apart from the women's magazines with which it is sometimes grouped, since, as reference descriptions emphasise, its subject is the household rather than women's issues as such. For a time it was one of the largest-circulation magazines in China of any kind: China Publishing Yearbook figures show average print runs of about 2.4 million copies per issue in 1993, 1994 and 1995, among the largest of any Chinese magazine of the period. Together with Zhiyin, the Wuhan magazine of emotional true-life stories, Family became one of China's best-known popular magazines for ordinary readers — the two titles between them defining the mass-market end of Chinese magazine publishing in the reform era.

Founded in Guangzhou in 1982

Family dates from 1982. Its home, Guangzhou, was one of the engines of China's early reform and opening up: a great southern trading city in Guangdong, the province that led much of the country's economic experimentation in the 1980s. The magazine appeared at a moment when the Chinese family itself was at the centre of national policy and public discussion; 1982 was also the year in which family planning was established as a basic national policy in China, reshaping the size and structure of the households the magazine addressed. A periodical devoted to how families should live, raise children and educate them was, in that setting, not a soft lifestyle product but a response to one of the most consequential changes in everyday Chinese life. Family's longevity rests on how early and how directly it occupied that ground: it was founded in the first years of reform, before most of the famous Chinese consumer magazine brands existed.

A Child of Marketisation

Media scholarship places Family among the titles created by the first great transformation of modern Chinese magazine publishing. In the Handbook of Magazine Studies, Xiang Ren's chapter on Chinese consumer magazines divides the industry's history since the Cultural Revolution into four overlapping stages — marketisation, internationalisation, privatisation and digitalisation. The first stage began in the early 1980s, when the Chinese government reduced subsidies for state-owned and state-run periodical publishers. Many poorly subsidised publishers, often owned and supervised by social organisations, had to implement reforms and seek market revenues. Publications that had previously focused on political, academic and administrative issues changed their titles, redefined their content areas and editorial styles, and metamorphosed into general-interest magazines covering popular science, culture and everyday life. The result, in that account, was the birth of many top-tier consumer magazine titles in China — Readers (Duzhe), Family (Jiating) and Friends (Zhiyin) named together as the leading examples. Family is thus one of the founding artefacts of commercial magazine publishing in modern China: a title that had to survive by being bought.

Editorial Focus: Family Life

The magazine's defining choice is contained in its name. Family's content focuses on family life: the relationships, routines, difficulties and decisions of the household. That focus gave it a different centre of gravity from the two kinds of magazine it sat between. It was not a news magazine, and it did not chase politics, business or celebrity. Nor, despite its huge female readership, was it in the strict sense a women's magazine: reference descriptions of the title draw the distinction explicitly, noting that its content concentrates on family life and children's education rather than on women's issues. The distinction mattered commercially as well as editorially. A magazine addressed to the family could be bought for the household, shared within it and kept in the home, and its subject matter renewed itself with every stage of family life, from young couples to grandparents. In a market where magazines were often traded among multiple readers and even posted on community bulletin boards, a household title had a natural pass-on readership built into its subject.

Children's Education at the Centre

Within family life, children's education holds the central place in Family's remit. The priority reflects the concerns of its founding era and of the decades that followed: as Chinese households grew smaller and more prosperous under reform, the education of children — very often an only child — became the consuming project of the family, the point at which its money, time, hopes and anxieties converged. A magazine that treated children's education as a core subject, alongside the wider conduct of family life, was speaking to the single most discussed topic around the Chinese dinner table. That positioning also helps explain the magazine's remarkable circulation stability in its peak years, described below: unlike fashion or entertainment titles, whose appeal rose and fell with taste, a family and education magazine addressed a need that every new cohort of parents felt as urgently as the last. Family's editorial promise was practical and emotional at once — guidance for the project its readers cared about most.

Circulation: About 2.4 Million Copies an Issue

The scale Family achieved is documented in official figures. China Publishing Yearbook tables, reproduced in Bu Wei's study of women in the Chinese media from the yearbooks of 1994, 1995 and 1996, give the magazine's average print run per issue as 2.44 million copies in 1993, 2.45 million in 1994 and 2.42 million in 1995 — an average of about 2.4 million copies per issue across the three years, a figure reference summaries of the magazine highlight as among the largest of any Chinese magazine of the period. The stability is as striking as the size: across three years in which several leading women's titles in the same tables were declining sharply from their early-1990s levels, Family's print run barely moved. In those tables it stood well above its famous Wuhan counterpart Zhiyin (Bosom Friend), whose average print run grew over the same years from 800,000 to 1.28 million copies, and above every women's magazine listed. A Guangzhou magazine about family life and children's education was, in the mid-1990s, one of the biggest printed products in China.

Family and Zhiyin: The Twin Pillars of Popular Reading

Chinese reference accounts habitually pair Family with Zhiyin. The two magazines, published from Guangzhou and Wuhan respectively, became together the best-known popular magazines for ordinary readers in China. The pairing is instructive because the two titles were complementary rather than identical. Zhiyin built its audience on emotional true-life stories under the motto of human beauty and kindness; Family built its audience on the life of the household and the education of children. One addressed the heart through other people's stories; the other addressed the home through the reader's own. Both were products of the same 1980s marketisation, both depended on readers choosing to pay for them, and both reached circulations in the millions while the advertising-led glossy magazine was still a novelty in China. To understand popular reading in 1990s China — the magazines found in homes, workplaces and bookstalls across the country — the pair, rather than any Beijing newsweekly or imported fashion title, is the place to start.

The Economics of the Early Consumer Magazine

Family's success was achieved under the austere economics of the first consumer magazine generation. Scholarship on the period describes management and operation that lacked professionalism and efficiency, editors and managers who knew little about commercial magazine publishing, and a domestic advertising market still too weak, in the first years of reform, to support titles on advertising revenue. Consumer magazines therefore depended heavily on subscription and newsstand sales, and although their low prices encouraged subscriptions, publishers still struggled to achieve financial independence. A title selling an average of 2.4 million copies per issue was the exception that proved what the model could do when it worked: at that scale, copy sales alone made a magazine a major business. Family's peak in the mid-1990s also came just before the internationalisation stage of Chinese consumer publishing, when foreign titles entered the market in growing numbers from the late 1980s onwards and competition for urban readers intensified — a contest in which a household title's mass audience, built over a decade, was its defence.

Guangzhou and the Southern Publishing Tradition

Family's base in Guangzhou is part of its identity. The great majority of China's nationally dominant periodicals have been published in Beijing, with a second tier in Shanghai. Family, like its fellow Guangdong titles in the wider popular market, demonstrated that the reform era allowed a southern provincial capital to build a national magazine. Guangzhou readers were among the first in China to experience the consumer society that reform created, and Guangdong's commercial energy supplied both the readership and the publishing culture from which a title like Family could grow. Its subject fitted its city as well: in a region where family networks and family enterprise were central to economic life, a magazine treating the household as the basic unit of society spoke to local experience while addressing a universal Chinese concern. The result was a national brand with a distinctly non-Beijing origin, one of the relatively few in Chinese magazine history.

Family in the Digital Era

Like all of China's print giants, Family has lived through the digital transition that overtook the industry: a decades-long trend of growth in advertising spending on print magazines reversed in 2012, and subscriptions to China's leading magazines fell for more than a decade as reading moved to phones and the internet multiplied the choice of entertainment. The Jiating brand, however, carried real weight into the social media era. In a Statista-based ranking of the leading magazine brands in China on social media as of July 2021, based on following and sharing numbers, Jiating placed ninth among all magazine brands in the country — a top-ten position alongside Duzhe, the international fashion titles, Chinese National Geography, Zhiyin and Banyuetan. For a title founded in 1982 on the printed concerns of the household, that ranking shows a brand still recognisable and still followed by a large online audience nearly forty years after its first issues.

Legacy

Family's legacy is that of a pioneer twice over. It was among the first top-tier consumer magazines created when Chinese publishing was pushed into the market in the early 1980s, named by media scholarship alongside Duzhe and Zhiyin as a founding title of that era. And it proved that the most ordinary subject of all — the life of the family and the education of its children — could sustain one of the largest magazine circulations in the world, holding an average print run of about 2.4 million copies per issue through the mid-1990s while rival titles rose and fell around it. Published from Guangzhou rather than the capital, focused on the household rather than on politics, fashion or women's issues narrowly defined, Family (Jiating) remains an essential title for anyone tracing how Chinese people read about their own lives during the reform decades — and how a magazine could become, for millions of households, part of the furniture of family life itself.