About Fuxin Television

Fuxin Television

Overview

Fuxin Television is the municipal television station of Fuxin in northwestern Liaoning province, China, run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within the Fuxin converged media centre. Its main channel carries local news, livelihood and cultural programming in Mandarin for a city that holds a unique place in China's economic history.

Fuxin was, in 2001, designated the country's first pilot city for the economic transformation of resource-exhausted cities — the test case for how a place built on coal survives the end of coal. Its other fame is agate: Fuxin is one of the world's great agate-working centres. Fuxin Television is the hometown broadcaster of that double story — exhaustion and reinvention, coal dust and polished stone.

The city it serves

Fuxin lies in northwestern Liaoning, about 170 kilometres west of Shenyang, in the transition zone between the Liaodong hills and the Horqin sandy lands. The prefecture covers 10,355 square kilometres and administers urban districts including Haizhou, Xihe and Xinqiu — the latter itself a mining district — together with Zhangwu County and Fuxin Mongol Autonomous County. The 2020 census counted 1,647,280 residents, of whom about 424,969 lived in the urban core.

The city's population includes a substantial Mongolian community, and its culture blends mining-town Han traditions with Mongol heritage. For its television station, the audience is a dispersed prefecture of mining districts, county farms and Mongol townships, for whom the local channel is a primary link to their municipal centre.

A century of coal

Coal was found near Fuxin in the late nineteenth century — one account tells of a rain-washed gully near Laojun Temple in Xinqiu revealing the seam — and a government-run mine, Jingfeng, opened in 1905; by 1913 sixteen pits were producing over 150,000 tonnes a year. Under Japanese occupation the Fuxin mines were expanded with forced labour to feed the Manchukuo economy. After 1949, the First Five-Year Plan made Fuxin a priority: the Fuxin Mining Bureau became one of China's largest coal producers, and from 1958 to 1985 the mining area produced some 320 million tonnes, averaging over ten million tonnes a year.

The giant of the coalfield was the Haizhou Open-Pit Mine, for decades among Asia's largest open-cast coal mines — a terraced canyon on the city's edge that became Fuxin's emblem. At the industry's height, half the city's residents worked in or depended on coal. The end came steadily: resources thinned, and between 2001 and 2010 the great pits — Xinqiu, Dongliang, Ping'an, Wangying, Haizhou itself — closed or went bankrupt one after another.

The first transformation pilot

At the end of 2001, Fuxin was identified as China's first pilot city for the economic transformation of resource-exhausted cities — a national experiment watched by every coal town in the country. The problems were severe: coal and coal-fired power had accounted for the overwhelming share of industrial output (some 76 per cent by one academic account) and over 60 per cent of fiscal revenue; more than 150,000 mining jobs were lost; subsidence and derelict land scarred the districts.

The response — billions of yuan in transformation projects, new industries in agricultural processing, equipment and later renewable energy, rehousing of mining communities, and the conversion of pits such as Haizhou into a mining-heritage park and lake-dotted recreation landscapes — has been documented in national media and academic studies ever since. Fuxin Television's news archive is the local record of that experiment, and its current reporting still leads on transformation: what is working, what lags, and how mining families are faring.

Agate: the other treasure

Fuxin's second resource was always in its soil: agate. Deposits in Qinghemen and Fuxin Mongol Autonomous County feed a carving and jewellery industry of national standing — the China Agate City market draws buyers from across the country and abroad, and agate exports are reported above a billion yuan a year. Generations of craftsmen have turned the banded stone into carvings, jewellery and ornaments; Liaoning Technical University's campus in the city trains specialists, and vocational schools feed artisans to the workshops.

For the television station, agate is the bright counterweight to the coal story: workshop features, master-carver profiles, trade-fair coverage and the branding of Fuxin as an agate capital give its cultural and economic programming a subject of genuine national and international reach.

Channels and services

Fuxin Television's main channel is a general service in Mandarin carrying the prefecture's news bulletins, livelihood programming and cultural features. Distribution covers the mining districts and counties, and the converged media centre extends the station's journalism to mobile platforms across the prefecture.

The station is the municipal tier of broadcasting for Fuxin, beneath Liaoning Television and CCTV. National media visit for the transformation story and the Haizhou pit; the local station covers the prefecture continuously — its factories and farms, its Mongol county, its schools and its long civic project of reinvention.

News and livelihood programming

News in Fuxin is dominated by the economics of transition: new projects and industries, employment for former miners, the renewal of mining districts and subsidence areas, pensions and services for an ageing industrial population. Wind and solar development — by 2022 renewables accounted for about a fifth of the city's power generation, with the Zhangwu wind farms among the region's large installations — feature as the energy economy's second act, and the station reports it as such.

Livelihood programming serves a population that has lived through upheaval: housing in the rebuilt districts, heating, health care, and the schools of the mining communities. Rural coverage reaches Zhangwu's farms and the Mongol county's livestock economy, balancing the urban-industrial agenda.

Mining culture and Mongol heritage

A century of mining shaped what local scholars call the city's character — the "sincere Fuxin" tradition of miners' endurance and dedication, embodied in the "Haizhou spirit". The closed Haizhou pit, preserved as industrial heritage, and the memorials of mining culture give the station's history programming a monumental subject: a canyon dug by generations, now the city's most famous landscape.

Mongolian culture supplies the other strand: Fuxin Mongol Autonomous County's language, music, wrestling and customs, and sites of Mongol history in the prefecture, appear in cultural coverage that distinguishes Fuxin from the Han mining cities further east. Agate craft — part industry, part art — bridges the two, employing the hands of a post-mining generation.

The converged media centre era

Fuxin Television operates within the city's converged media centre under the national reform of local media, which merges radio, television and new media into a single newsroom serving all platforms. For a prefecture of modest means, the pooling of resources is essential economics; for a city marketing agate and courting investment and tourism, the centre's digital output is the shop window.

The centre's short-video and e-commerce-adjacent content carries Fuxin agate to national consumers, while its service platforms deliver municipal information, weather and public notices to the mining districts and counties — the broadcaster as both promoter and public utility.

Audience and community role

The station's audience carries the transformation in its own biographies: retired miners and their children, agate workers and traders, farmers in Zhangwu, herders and townspeople in the Mongol county. Local television's role in such a community is partly memorial — honouring the mining century — and partly prospective, explaining and scrutinising the new economy as it is built.

Public service completes the remit: transformation policies affect livelihoods directly, and the station is the channel through which entitlements, projects and opportunities reach the districts. Trust in that function is the municipal broadcaster's capital.

Significance and outlook

Fuxin Television serves the city where China first confronted the end of a resource economy. Every coal and oil town in the country has since faced Fuxin's questions; the station's two decades of coverage — closure, experiment, agate and wind — constitute a unique local archive of how one city answered them.

The outlook is cautiously hopeful: renewable energy, agate and agricultural processing give the prefecture real industries, and the mining-heritage landscape a growing visitor economy. Fuxin Television's task is to keep telling that unfinished story — the pit that became a park, the coal city that learned new trades — to the people whose lives it is.