About Great Wall Net

Great Wall Net

Great Wall Net, published at hebccw.cn and known in Chinese as Changcheng Wang, is the news portal of the Hebei Great Wall New Media Group in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province. The group was formed in 2017 around Hebei's online news operations, making Great Wall Net the digital flagship of a purpose-built provincial converged-media group rather than a newspaper's afterthought. It publishes Hebei news, video and government services as a provincial mainstream new-media platform, operates an English-language channel at english.hebccw.cn, and distributes Hebei reporting internationally under the Great Wall New Media name. It is distinct from Hebei News Net, the province's other established portal — a distinction Hebei media directories are careful to preserve.

A group built for convergence

Most Chinese provincial web portals grew out of newspaper groups; Great Wall Net's parent was assembled the other way round. The Hebei Great Wall New Media Group, formed in 2017, gathered the province's online news operations into a single company whose core asset is digital. That origin shows in the product: the platform is organised as a new-media operation first — website, video, mobile and social distribution, plus government-service functions — with the authority of a provincial mainstream outlet. The group's name borrows Hebei's most famous asset: more than 1,300 kilometres of Ming-era Great Wall run through the province, across eight cities and forty counties, including celebrated sections at Shanhaiguan, Jinshanling and Baiyangyu, where a rare 1.5-kilometre marble-built stretch in Qian'an, raised under the Ming general Qi Jiguang, still draws visitors. "Great Wall" is both a brand and a statement of provincial identity.

News content and services

Great Wall Net publishes the full Hebei agenda: provincial party and government news; the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei coordinated development programme, the regional integration strategy in which Hebei is the spacious partner to the two municipalities; the Xiong'an New Area, the national new area established in Hebei to receive non-capital functions from Beijing; industry and agriculture across the province's eleven prefecture-level cities; culture and tourism along the Wall and the coast at Qinhuangdao; and public and government services for Hebei residents. Its video and photographic output is prominent — the group produces packaged features as well as spot news — and its English channel carries selected Hebei stories for foreign readers, complete with production credits in the style of a broadcast operation.

The outward-facing productions

Great Wall New Media's international output gives the clearest public view of its editorial style. Its reports are distributed through international press-release wires credited to Great Wall New Media Group, under series titles such as "What Hebei Can Offer" — episodes that have presented Shijiazhuang's biopharmaceutical cluster, in the city's high-tech zone, as a model industrial cluster with a full chain from research and development through manufacturing and distribution, and traced Hebei's dairy industry, including the Shijiazhuang-headquartered Junlebao group, for foreign audiences. Another production, "Gen Z Walks China: Building Cultural Bridges Through Youth Exchange," followed American middle-school teachers and students travelling in China in 2025. Its English site's "China Opportunity" series has profiled Hebei champions going global — including Baoding-based Great Wall Motor, which sold more than 289,000 vehicles overseas in the first half of 2025, up 45.46 per cent year on year, with products in more than 170 countries and regions and a first Americas plant in Brazil scheduled to start production in August 2025. These productions are made under the guidance of the Hebei provincial government's Information Office, with the Hebei Foreign Publicity and Exchange Center as a supporting unit — the standard structure for a provincial group's external-communication work.

Hebei's story as the group tells it

The beats those productions reveal are the province's strategic priorities: biomedicine in Shijiazhuang, dairy and food processing, the automobile industry in Baoding, steel and equipment manufacturing, and the opportunities created by Beijing's overflow — industrial, logistical and touristic — into Hebei. The same priorities structure the portal's Chinese-language news: Xiong'an's construction, the integration of transport and public services across Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei, environmental management of the North China plain, and the protection of the province's Great Wall sections, where Hebei's regulations assign responsibilities to local governments, employ protection workers along the wall, and prohibit harmful construction in the name of protection. A reader following hebccw.cn over time gets the province's official development narrative in daily instalments.

Place in Hebei's media landscape

Hebei has two provincial portals with similar briefs, and directory users must keep them apart. Hebei News Net is the older portal associated with the Hebei Daily newspaper group. Great Wall Net, at hebccw.cn, belongs to the Great Wall New Media Group formed in 2017. Both are licensed provincial mainstream platforms; they are separate organisations with separate newsrooms and domains. Great Wall Net is also distinct from the Hebei provincial government portal — an administrative site — and from Great Wall Motor, the Baoding automaker with which it shares only a name drawn from the same monument.

Government services function

Unusually among news portals, Great Wall Net's brief explicitly includes government services alongside news and video. In the Chinese provincial media system, flagship new-media groups have increasingly become operators of the province's digital public square: publishing official announcements, hosting service entry points and running the accounts through which departments communicate. Great Wall Net's positioning as a "provincial mainstream new-media platform" reflects that expanded role — part newsroom, part civic infrastructure — which the 2017 group structure was designed to deliver.

Media convergence context

Great Wall Net is a creature of the convergence era in its purest provincial form. Where older groups retrofitted convergence onto newspaper organisations, Hebei in 2017 built a group whose centre of gravity was the network itself, and then gave that group mainstream status, an English channel and an external-communication mandate. Its development since — wire-distributed video features, credited production teams, themed international series — shows the model operating as intended: a provincial story, produced once by a converged newsroom, and distributed in Chinese at home and in English abroad.

Audience

The portal's core audience is Hebei's population of more than seventy million, following provincial news and using its services in Chinese. Its English channel and wire-distributed features address a second audience — foreign readers, investors and exchange visitors — for whom Great Wall New Media is often the producer of the Hebei content they encounter. Researchers on regional integration in the Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei area also use it as the province's statement of record.

Reading Hebei through Great Wall Net

Taken together, the portal's output amounts to a running brief for a province in transition. Hebei surrounds the capital yet has historically been overshadowed by it; the stories Great Wall New Media chooses to package — a Shijiazhuang pharmaceutical cluster presented as a complete industrial system, dairy groups touring their full chain from farm to shelf for foreign cameras, students crossing the Pacific for cultural exchange under Hebei guidance — are arguments that the province is a place of capability in its own right. Its heritage coverage makes the same argument historically: a province holding 1,300 kilometres of the Ming wall, marble-built sections raised under Qi Jiguang and passes known to every Chinese schoolchild does not lack for identity. Great Wall Net's editorial project is to convert that inheritance, and the Xiong'an-era investment wave, into a coherent provincial brand — published daily at hebccw.cn.

Official website

Great Wall Net is published from Shijiazhuang at its official website, hebccw.cn, with an English-language channel at english.hebccw.cn. It is the news portal of the Hebei Great Wall New Media Group, formed in 2017, and should be distinguished from Hebei News Net.