About Fushun Television

Fushun Television

Overview

Fushun Television (Chinese: 抚顺电视台) is the television service of Fushun, a prefecture-level city in eastern Liaoning province, just east of the provincial capital Shenyang. It operates as part of Fushun Radio and Television Station, the municipal broadcaster whose current organisation dates from 2011 and which runs two television channels and three radio frequencies for the prefecture.

The station broadcasts in Mandarin from a city with two powerful identities: an old coal and petrochemical centre built around one of Asia's largest open-pit mines, and the city where the soldier Lei Feng served and died — a connection Fushun Television has carried further than any broadcaster in China, launching the country's first television channel devoted to Lei Feng.

Origins: radio in 1950, television in 1958

The broadcaster's institutional roots reach back to the first years of the People's Republic. Its radio predecessor dates to 1 June 1950, and its television predecessor to 1958, placing Fushun among the earlier Chinese cities to acquire broadcasting services of its own. Those separate radio and television organisations served the city in parallel for decades, through Fushun's decades as one of China's great heavy-industrial bases.

The present-day Fushun Radio and Television Station was formed in 2011, uniting the radio and television services in a single municipal broadcaster of the kind created across China in that period. The combined station operates by cable and wireless transmission across Fushun and maintains an official website at fs024.com, together with a presence in the Liaoning media portals.

Two television channels

Fushun Television's line-up consists of two channels. The Comprehensive Channel is the flagship: Fushun's first wireless television channel, a general service built around news, current affairs and feature programmes. The Education Channel is devoted chiefly to science and education programming. The channel descriptions recorded by the National Radio and Television Administration present a compact, conventional prefecture-level portfolio — one general channel for the whole city, one specialist channel for learning.

Both channels share the station's production base in Fushun and serve the prefecture's districts and counties, including the Manchu autonomous counties in its east. Programming is in Mandarin, and the flagship carries the city's daily news agenda: municipal government, industry, community affairs and the continuing story of a resource city in transition.

High definition in 2023

On 26 December 2023, both of Fushun's television channels began broadcasting in high definition, a step reported at the time by the station's own new-media outlet, Fushun New Vision. The HD switch brought the prefecture's channels into line with the national modernisation of terrestrial television, under which municipal stations across Liaoning upgraded their main and specialist channels to high-definition production and transmission.

The station's technical standing has also been recognised within the province: Fushun Radio and Television Station appears in the Liaoning provincial broadcasting authorities' 2025 list of collectives commended for positive contributions to safe broadcasting, the discipline that ensures uninterrupted, secure transmission of radio and television services.

Radio: three frequencies alongside

The television channels sit within a wider broadcast family. Fushun's Comprehensive Radio, on FM 93.0 MHz, is a general frequency centred on news, public welfare, service and supervision programming. The Economy and Traffic frequency, on FM 106.1 MHz, serves drivers with road conditions, life and economic information and service programmes. Music Radio, on FM 90.1 MHz, provides cultural and entertainment news, literature, music and entertainment.

Together, the two television channels and three radio frequencies give the merged station a full local portfolio: news and public service at its core, education and music at its edges, and traffic information for a prefecture threaded by the expressways between Shenyang and eastern Liaoning.

The Leifeng Channel experiment

Fushun Television's most unusual chapter began at the end of March 2015, when the station launched the Leifeng Channel — described in national reporting as China's first television channel themed on Lei Feng, the People's Liberation Army soldier whose selflessness has been promoted as a national model since the 1960s. The channel carried six programmes designed to encourage people to cultivate virtue and do good deeds.

Shang Zeyou, the vice-head of the Fushun broadcasting and television station, told reporters the channel hoped to set Lei Feng as a role model for people in Fushun and throughout the province. The idea came from Zhang Xiuli, who acknowledged that no marketing campaign had been created to promote the channel's brand. Reporting by China Youth Daily, carried by People's Daily Online, found that most local people had barely heard of the channel and could not easily distinguish its programming from regular commercial television — an honest record of how difficult it is for a virtue-themed channel to build an audience, and a story that drew national attention to the experiment in Fushun.

A city that carries Lei Feng's name

The channel was no arbitrary branding exercise. Lei Feng's military unit was based in Fushun, and it was in Fushun that he died on 15 August 1962, aged 22. His civic standing in the city predated his fame: he had been elected to the Fushun Municipal People's Congress in 1961, and after his death his unit was renamed the "Lei Feng Unit" in January 1963, weeks before the national campaign began. Fushun's identity is layered in its nicknames — coal capital, Manchu homeland, Lei Feng City, and "place of fortune's beginning" among them — and the broadcaster's output moves between all four. After Mao Zedong called on the nation to learn from him in March 1963, Fushun became one of the two cities most closely associated with his memory: it maintains a Lei Feng Memorial Hall with his tomb, and has named a Lei Feng Road, a Lei Feng primary school and a Lei Feng middle school after him. The city counts "Lei Feng City" among its nicknames.

For the local broadcaster, that inheritance is a standing editorial theme: volunteer service, good-deed campaigns and the annual cycle of Lei Feng commemorations each March are part of the city's civic calendar, and of its television schedules.

Coal, petrochemicals and a city in transition

Fushun's other identity is industrial. The city grew as one of China's great coal centres — its West Open-Pit Mine is among the largest in Asia — and as a petrochemical base, and it keeps "coal capital" among its nicknames. Resource exhaustion and industrial restructuring have made transition the central story of modern Fushun, and the station's news and features follow it: mine-land restoration, new industries, and the lives of mining communities.

The prefecture also holds a Manchu heritage of national significance, centred on Hetu Ala, the early Manchu stronghold in Xinbin, and a landscape of rivers and forested hills east of the coalfield. Heritage and tourism coverage balances the industrial agenda in the station's output.

Why Fushun Television matters

Fushun Television is a representative modern prefecture broadcaster — two channels, three radio frequencies, high-definition since 2023 — with one distinction no other station in China shares: it created a whole channel in honour of the soldier its city claims as its own. The Leifeng Channel's struggle to find viewers was reported as candidly as its launch, which makes Fushun's experiment a small, well-documented case study in the ambitions and limits of values-themed local television.

Behind that experiment stands a broadcaster rooted in services founded in 1950 and 1958, serving a city negotiating the passage from coal to whatever comes next. Its screens carry both stories — the red heritage of Lei Feng and the hard economics of a resource city in transition — to the households of Fushun every day.