About Ganzhou Television

Ganzhou Television

Overview

Ganzhou Television (Chinese: 赣州电视台) is the municipal television station of Ganzhou in southern Jiangxi, operated by the Ganzhou radio and television broadcaster as part of the prefecture's converged media operation. Its flagship channel provides news, livelihood and cultural programming in Mandarin for Jiangxi's largest prefecture by area. Ganzhou is a historic Hakka heartland with a preserved Song-dynasty city wall and floating bridge, the starting region of the Long March at Yudu and Ruijin, and a centre for navel oranges, tungsten and rare earths. Hakka culture, red heritage and orchard agriculture shape its schedules, in a prefecture bigger than Hainan province whose population is more than 95 percent Hakka.

The southern gate of Jiangxi

Ganzhou — Gannan, in its regional name — is Jiangxi's largest and most populous prefecture-level city, a mountainous territory of hills and basins on the borders with Guangdong, Fujian and Hunan. Its city stands where the Zhang and Gong rivers merge to form the Gan River, the great waterway that flows north through Jiangxi to Poyang Lake and the Yangtze. A first county administration was planted here in 201 AD; the name Ganzhou itself was fixed in the Southern Song, in 1153, and the city ranked in its Song heyday among the largest in the empire — a shipbuilding, ceramics and printing centre on the trade route between the Yangtze valley and the far south.

Scale is the station's first fact: eighteen county-level divisions of mountain towns and basin farms, hours apart on winding roads, looking to one prefecture channel for their common news. Ganzhou Television's bulletins knit together a territory the size of a small province, and its county reporting — oranges in the south, mining in the west, the old city at the centre — is the prefecture's shared conversation.

Jiangnan Song City: walls, drains and a floating bridge

Ganzhou calls itself the Jiangnan Song City, the Song-dynasty city south of the Yangtze, because its Song fabric survives as nowhere else in the region. Its Song city wall, some 3,664 metres of brick rampart along the rivers, is described as the largest and best-preserved brick city wall of the Song era in China, its bricks still stamped with the names of their makers and reigns. Beneath the old streets runs the Fushougou, a Song drainage system designed under the prefect Liu Yi, whose twelve water gates open and close with the river's level and have kept the old city from flooding for nine centuries — an underground heritage now presented in its own museum.

At the rivers' meeting stand the Bajingtai terrace, the city's emblematic viewpoint, and the ancient floating bridge, a pontoon crossing of linked boats in the Song tradition, still in daily use. Add the Ganzhou Confucian Temple — the largest and best preserved in Jiangxi — and the Tongtian Rock grottoes, with their hundreds of carved statues begun in the Tang, and the old city offers the station a heritage beat of rare completeness: a living Song city, not a reconstruction, going about its business inside its own walls.

Cradle of the Hakka

Ganzhou is known as the Cradle of the Hakka. The Hakka — the "guest families", descendants of migrants who moved south from the Central Plains over centuries of upheaval — made their first great staging ground here, and more than 95 percent of the prefecture's people are Hakka today. Over 600 Hakka walled enclosures, the fortified communal houses of the south, survive in its counties such as Longnan — a concentration likened, in local promotion, to an eastern Rome of enclosed villages.

Hakka language, food, festivals and building craft give the channel a cultural identity distinct from the Gan-speaking north of its own province: stuffed tofu and plate duck, sour date cakes and grey goose, mountain songs and the ancestor halls of the enclosures. For the large Hakka diaspora — in Guangdong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia and beyond — Ganzhou's claim to be the ancestral staging post makes its cultural programming a matter of roots, and roots-seeking visitors from overseas are a recurring, emotional presence in its features.

Ruijin and Yudu: the red cradle

In November 1931, at Ruijin in the prefecture's east, the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed, with its provisional central government seated in this remote county town — which is why Ruijin is called the Cradle of the Republic, its Red Well and congress sites preserved as a national 5A-level scenic area and a place of pilgrimage in revolutionary education. Three years later the Central Red Army, its strength ebbing under encirclement, assembled and crossed the Yu River at Yudu in October 1934 — the first crossing of the Long March. The memorial park at Yudu's East Gate ferry marks the departure point of the most famous march in Chinese history.

Red heritage is thus foundational in Ganzhou, not decorative. The station's documentary and anniversary output returns to Ruijin and Yudu constantly, and its news covers the red-tourism economy — study tours, memorial museums, the old base-area counties' development — as a living industry built on the prefecture's hardest years.

Oranges, tungsten and rare earths

The modern economy rests on three products. The Gannan navel orange, grown across the southern counties around Xinfeng and Anyuan, has made Ganzhou the "world orange township" of its tourism slogans — one of the world's largest navel-orange producers, whose harvest season each autumn is a prefecture-wide event of picking, packing and e-commerce livestreams. Underground, the western counties hold tungsten — Ganzhou styles itself the world's tungsten capital — and the ionic rare earths for which Gannan is a strategic national source, an industry whose environmental clean-up and regulated revival the station follows closely. Nankang, meanwhile, built a furniture industry that ships across China. Orchard seasons, mine policy and factory orders together form the channel's business agenda.

The converged media operation

Ganzhou Television works inside the prefecture's converged media operation, where its newsroom is joined with Ganzhou's other media and digital platforms. The flagship channel carries the daily news and the livelihood and cultural programmes of its service profile, while the centre distributes its material — a Song-wall feature, a Yudu memorial report, an orange-harvest livestream — to the wider Hakka and Jiangxi audience online. Given the prefecture's size and its people's dispersal across China's factory cities, that digital reach is not an extra for the centre; it is how much of Ganzhou now watches Ganzhou.

Programming and audience

The channel's described mix — news, livelihood and cultural programming in Mandarin — carries three strong local strands its profile names: Hakka culture, red heritage and orchard agriculture. Around them sit county news from eighteen divisions, the orange and mining economies, education and health services, and the weather of the mountain south. Its audience is one of the largest of any prefecture station in Jiangxi, spread from the old city inside the Song walls to mining and orange towns hours away, with a diaspora watching from farther still.

Why Ganzhou Television matters

Ganzhou compresses three of China's great stories into one prefecture: the Song city's golden age, preserved in brick and drain; the Hakka migration that peopled the south; and the Soviet republic and Long March departure that reshaped the twentieth century. Ganzhou Television matters as the broadcaster that holds those inheritances together for the largest prefecture in its province — reporting orange prices and rare-earth policy in the same bulletin that keeps the red cradle and the Hakka cradle in daily view.