About Guangxi TV

Guangxi TV

Guangxi TV, or Guangxi Satellite Television, is the provincial satellite channel of Guangxi Radio and Television, based in Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region in southern China. It is the flagship satellite service of the regional broadcaster, distributed nationally by satellite and cable, and listings of China's provincial satellite network trace Guangxi Satellite Television to a 1970 origin under Guangxi Television. It broadcasts in Mandarin, carrying news, drama and entertainment, including ASEAN-facing and Zhuang culture programming, for Guangxi and nationwide audiences. Two facts define the channel's brief. First, Guangxi is the home of the Zhuang, China's largest ethnic minority, and twelve ethnic groups have lived in the region for generations, with minorities forming nearly forty per cent of the population. Second, Guangxi is China's gateway to ASEAN: it borders Vietnam, faces Southeast Asia across the Beibu Gulf, and its capital Nanning is the permanent host city of the China-ASEAN Expo. Guangxi TV is therefore both a Zhuang-region flagship and the most ASEAN-facing of China's provincial satellite channels, and its broadcaster's recent work — a China-ASEAN youth broadcasters' camp, an annual China-ASEAN Audiovisual Week — is built squarely on that double identity.

The Broadcaster: Guangxi Radio and Television

Guangxi TV's parent is the regional broadcasting organisation of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, today styled Guangxi Radio and Television, headquartered in Nanning. Provincial satellite listings record Guangxi Satellite Television with Guangxi as its origin, a 1970 start and Guangxi Television as its owner — a date that places the region's television among the earlier provincial services in China, consistent with an autonomous region that established its own broadcasting in the first decades of Chinese television. The broadcaster operates as a state media organisation of the autonomous region, and its remit extends beyond domestic programming into international exchange: academic study of its recent work identifies Guangxi Radio and Television in Nanning as the organiser of the China-ASEAN Youth Broadcasters' Creative Camp, and the broadcaster is a central participant in the China-ASEAN Audiovisual Week, the regional media-exchange platform held since 2019. Viewers should distinguish the broadcaster from the similarly named Guangxi Radio and Television Information Network, the region's cable-network company, which was established in 2000 to operate cable and communications services and reported some 3.5 million cable subscribers in 2022 — the network carries channels, including Guangxi TV itself, but the channel and its programmes belong to the broadcaster.

Nanning: The Green City and ASEAN Gateway

The channel broadcasts from Nanning, the capital of Guangxi, a city known as the Green City for its subtropical vegetation and tree cover, set on the Yong River in the south of the region. Nanning is Guangxi's political, economic, cultural, educational, scientific and financial centre, home to around nine million people, and it is the permanent venue of the China-ASEAN Expo — the annual trade fair that has made Nanning the regular meeting place of China and the ten ASEAN states. Through more than two decades of hosting the Expo, the city has built what is called the Nanning Channel: a standing platform linking China and ASEAN in political dialogue, trade and investment and people-to-people exchange. Six ASEAN countries maintain consulates-general in Nanning, and the city holds sister-city relations with dozens of foreign cities. For Guangxi TV, this means its home city is itself a news story of international cooperation — the channel's crews cover the Expo, its summits and its cultural programmes as home events, and the broadcaster's ASEAN-facing programming is produced in the city where China-ASEAN exchange physically happens.

The Zhuang Homeland

Guangxi is an autonomous region because of the Zhuang. The Zhuang number more than fifteen million people — about 32.5 per cent of Guangxi's permanent population — and they are the ethnic minority with the largest population in all of China. Their ancestors, a branch of the ancient Baiyue peoples, had settled the valleys of the Zuo and You rivers and the Hongshui and Liujiang rivers as long as 3,000 years ago, and today they live mainly around Nanning, Liuzhou, Baise and Hechi. The Zhuang have their own language, with a written Zhuang script created in 1955. Around them live eleven other long-established peoples of Guangxi — Han, Yao, Miao, Dong, Maonan, Hui, Jing, Shui, Yi, Gelao and Mulam among the twelve indigenous groups commonly listed — with ethnic minorities together accounting for about 39 per cent of the region's population of some fifty million. Guangxi's Zhuang Autonomous Region was established in 1958. For the regional broadcaster, this population is both audience and subject: the channel's Zhuang culture programming, recorded in the WorldNM directory as a named part of its output, presents the songs, festivals, dress, food and river-valley landscapes of the Zhuang homeland to the region itself and to the national satellite audience.

Zhuang Culture and the March the Third Festival

The emblem of Zhuang culture is Sanyuesan — the third day of the third lunar month — Guangxi's great song festival, celebrated across the region as the Zhuang March 3 holiday and developed in Nanning into the Zhuang March 3, Eight Gui Carnival, a cultural and tourism event built on the national intangible heritage of the festival. Its roots lie in the Zhuang song-fair tradition, in which villages gathered to sing antiphonal songs; the Nanning International Folk Song Art Festival grew from the same Zhuang song heritage and has been ranked among China's most internationally influential festivals. Zhuang song culture, the bronze-drum traditions of the Hongshui River valley, the terraced fields of Longsheng, and the Dong villages of Sanjiang with their drum towers and wind-and-rain bridges all belong to the cultural territory Guangxi TV documents. The Zhuang connection also reaches into the province's most famous scenery: the karst landscape of Guilin and the Li River, celebrated as among the most beautiful in China, lies within a region where Zhuang, Yao and Miao villages dot the countryside, and the Longji rice terraces above Longsheng were built by Zhuang and Yao farmers. A channel serving Guangxi thus programmes across a single connected culture-scape, from Nanning's festival stages to the song fairs of the river valleys.

The ASEAN-Facing Channel

Guangxi is the only Chinese region with both a land border with an ASEAN country — Vietnam — and a coastline on the Beibu Gulf facing Southeast Asia, and its broadcaster has built organised ASEAN-facing work on that position. The China-ASEAN Youth Broadcasters' Creative Camp, launched in 2021 and organised by Guangxi Radio and Television, brings young broadcasters from China and ASEAN countries together to make short videos on food, music, daily life and youth entrepreneurship; research on the programme finds it has enhanced Guangxi's international image and fostered cultural exchange between China and ASEAN. The camp sits within the framework of the China-ASEAN Audiovisual Week, a platform for regional media exchange and cooperation held since 2019. Guangxi's wider media environment reinforces the orientation: the Voice of Beibu Gulf radio service, started in October 2009 as China's first regional international broadcasting frequency, targets audiences in Vietnam, Thailand and other ASEAN countries in five languages including Vietnamese, Thai, English, Cantonese and Mandarin. Guangxi TV's ASEAN-facing programming strand — named as such in the directory — is the television expression of the same strategy: from Nanning, the Expo city, the region's flagship channel presents Guangxi as China's bridge to Southeast Asia and carries China-ASEAN stories to the national audience.

Programming: News, Drama and Entertainment

The WorldNM directory summarises Guangxi TV's schedule as Mandarin news, drama and entertainment, including ASEAN-facing and Zhuang culture programming, and each part maps onto the region it serves. News from Nanning covers a region of fourteen prefecture-level cities and some fifty million people, with the China-ASEAN relationship — the Expo, the Beibu Gulf ports, the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, and the border trade with Vietnam — as a standing theme no other provincial channel owns. Drama and entertainment take the standard prime-time forms of the Chinese satellite system. The cultural strand draws on the Zhuang March 3 festival, Zhuang song fairs, Dong and Yao and Miao village cultures, and the region's celebrated landscapes: the Li River from Guilin to Yangshuo, Beihai's Silver Beach and Weizhou Island on the Beibu Gulf coast, the Detian waterfall on the Vietnamese border, and the Huashan rock paintings of the Zuo River. Tourism programming is a natural strength in a region counting more than four hundred scenic spots. The result is a general channel with two unmistakable specialisations — Zhuang Guangxi and ASEAN-facing Guangxi — visible across its cultural and current-affairs output.

Guangxi's Landscapes on Screen

Guangxi's scenery does for the channel what the Zhuang heritage does for its culture programming. The karst towers along the Li River between Guilin and Yangshuo are among the most reproduced landscapes in China, printed on banknotes and known to foreign visitors for generations. The region's five recognised tourist areas — Guilin, Nanning, Liuzhou, south-eastern Guangxi and the coastal Beihai area — give a factual crew an unusual range within one region: river karst, the dragon-pond scenery of Liuzhou, Qingxiu Mountain in Nanning, the historic port streets of Wuzhou, Silver Beach at Beihai, and the terraced hills and minority villages of the north. Guangxi's audio-visual industry has continued to invest in presenting this territory, including cooperation projects signed at the China (Shenzhen) International Cultural Industries Fair covering astronomical science popularisation for ASEAN audiences and a regional centre for national cultural data oriented towards ASEAN — small signs of a region that treats audio-visual production as part of its outward-facing strategy, with its flagship channel at the centre.

Distribution and Reach

Guangxi TV is distributed nationally by satellite and cable as a member of China's provincial satellite network, so the channel from Nanning is available in line-ups across China. Regionally, the autonomous region's cable network — operated by the Guangxi Radio and Television Information Network with millions of subscribers across Guangxi — is one of the main pipes carrying the channel to its home audience, alongside satellite reception and online distribution. Its international reach runs through exchange rather than foreign carriage: the Audiovisual Week and the Youth Broadcasters' Creative Camp connect Guangxi Radio and Television directly with ASEAN broadcasters, and the region's stories circulate through China-ASEAN media cooperation mechanisms centred on Nanning. The audience structure is therefore layered — Guangxi's fifty million residents as the home base, the nationwide satellite audience as the national stage, and ASEAN media partners as the channel's distinctive external network.

Guangxi TV Today

Guangxi TV today is the satellite flagship of Guangxi Radio and Television, broadcasting in Mandarin from Nanning with a lineage that provincial listings trace to 1970. It serves the Zhuang autonomous region — home of China's largest ethnic minority, of the March the Third song festival and of the Li River's karst — and it is at the same time the provincial channel of China's ASEAN gateway, based in the permanent host city of the China-ASEAN Expo and backed by its broadcaster's organised exchange work with Southeast Asian media since 2019. News, drama and entertainment form its schedule, but Zhuang culture and ASEAN-facing programming give it a double distinction few Chinese provincial channels can match. For the directory reader, Guangxi TV is the screen of the Eight Gui land: a regional flagship that speaks for the Zhuang homeland at home, and for China-ASEAN exchange to the nation.