About Guyuan Television

Guyuan Television

Overview

Guyuan Television is the prefecture-level television station of Guyuan in southern Ningxia, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now integrated into the Guyuan converged media centre. Its flagship channel carries local news, agriculture and poverty-alleviation-successor rural-revitalisation programming in Mandarin. Guyuan, in the Liupan Mountains, was a landmark on the Long March route, and its Xihaigu counties were once labelled among China's poorest areas, giving the station a strong rural-development remit.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. The documented position — prefecture-level broadcaster, converged media centre, flagship news, agriculture and rural-revitalisation channel in Mandarin — and the balance its record describes between Long March heritage and a hard-won story of poverty relief and ecological recovery, are the factual foundation of this profile.

Guyuan in the Liupan Mountains of southern Ningxia

Guyuan is a prefecture-level city in the south of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, in the Liupan Mountains. It is the southern anchor of a small autonomous region whose capital, Yinchuan, lies far to the north on the Yellow River plain. Southern Ningxia is a different landscape from that plain: loess hills and mountain country, drier, higher and historically much poorer, where farming depended on uncertain rainfall.

That geography shapes everything the station covers. Guyuan's counties include places whose names together form Xihaigu — a name derived from Xiji, Haiyuan and Guyuan — and the prefecture's story cannot be told apart from that wider region. A prefecture-level broadcaster here does not serve a single compact urban audience. It serves mountain counties, terraced fields, county towns and villages spread across difficult terrain, for whom local television news, weather, agricultural information and public services carry a practical weight that goes beyond entertainment.

The flagship channel and its rural-development remit

The flagship channel carries local news, agriculture and rural-revitalisation programming in Mandarin, as the station record describes it. That remit follows directly from Guyuan's history. Where a prefecture was once defined nationally by poverty, the successor agenda — consolidating poverty-alleviation gains and revitalising the countryside — is the central public story, and a local station is expected to follow it county by county and village by village.

Within the Guyuan converged media centre, television reporting is produced alongside the city's other media output. Convergence matters in a prefecture like this one: the same reporting on a cattle cooperative, a potato harvest, a new road or a restored hillside can reach viewers on the flagship channel and residents on other platforms from a single newsroom, while the channel itself remains the common screen for the whole prefecture.

Liupan Mountain and the Long March

Guyuan's place in modern Chinese history was fixed in October 1935. From 5 to 9 October 1935, Mao Zedong led the Central Red Army over Liupan Mountain, the last major mountain barrier on that stage of the Long March. On the crossing Mao wrote the lyric poem 'Qing Ping Le — Liupan Mountain', whose image of the red flag over the mountain's summit remains one of the best-known literary associations of the Long March in Ningxia.

A year later the story reached its conclusion in this region. In October 1936 the main forces of the Red Army met in the Guyuan area — accounts centre on the Jiangtaibao, or Taibao, meeting — marking the victorious end of the Long March. For Guyuan Television, that history is not distant background. Liupan Mountain, the meeting sites and the revolution-themed visitor routes built around them are living local subjects: commemorations, red tourism, school and community education, and the care of memorial places all recur in the prefecture's cultural and news coverage.

Xihaigu: a name once given to hardship

Xihaigu was for decades a byword for poverty in China. In 1972, experts associated with the United Nations and the World Food Programme declared the region among the places most unfit for human settlement, a judgement rooted in its fragile ecology, drought and barren loess land. In the early years of reform and opening up, more than 80 percent of its people lived in poverty, by the accounts cited in national reporting. Water was the sharpest constraint of all: per capita water resources in Xihaigu were less than 8 percent of the national average.

The name itself explains the region a Guyuan broadcaster serves. Xihaigu combines Xiji County, Haiyuan County and Guyuan, and in its wider official use it covers a group of counties and districts in southern and central Ningxia administered from Guyuan, Zhongwei and Wuzhong. Guyuan city contains several of its core counties. When national media described Xihaigu, they were in large part describing the villages and hillsides in Guyuan Television's own transmission area.

The long poverty campaign and relocation

China's organised poverty campaign in Xihaigu began in 1982, when the region was made a target of a dedicated reduction programme with special funding. Over the following decades the work combined water projects, ecological restoration, industry-building and, most dramatically, relocation. Over some thirty years, Ningxia carried out six large-scale relocations, moving about 1.23 million people from the most inhospitable parts of Xihaigu to more habitable areas, many of them closer to Yellow River irrigation.

The end of that long campaign came in November 2020, when Xiji — the last Xihaigu county still on the national poverty list — was removed from it. National reporting at the time recorded that the number of people living in poverty in Ningxia, most of them from Xihaigu, had fallen from 1.19 million in 1982 to 18,800 by the end of 2019. For a local station, those are not abstract totals: they are the accumulated subject matter of decades of reporting on drinking-water cisterns, resettled villages, new schools and clinics, and families whose lives changed address as well as income.

Greening the loess: forests return to Guyuan

Poverty relief in Guyuan was inseparable from ecological repair. The same over-cultivation and forest loss that made the loess hills barren also made them erode, and programmes such as shelterbelt planting and returning farmland to forest and grass gradually changed the hills themselves. In Guyuan, forest coverage rose from 1.4 percent in the late 1970s to about 28.4 percent in 2019, and to 27.28 percent in 2022 in the figures cited by national reporting — a transformation visible in any aerial view of the prefecture today.

Longwangba Village in Guyuan became the internationally told example of that change. Once part of an area declared uninhabitable, the village rebuilt itself around terraced fields, ecological farming and tourism on its mountain terrain. In 2023 it received more than 410,000 tourists, with tourist revenue of 19.41 million yuan, and villagers' annual per capita disposable income rose from less than 2,300 yuan in 2012 to 15,500 yuan in 2023. In 2024 a representative of Longwangba shared its green transformation at the 60th International Agriculture Fair in Paris, and its story was documented in a Chinese-French co-produced documentary. Stories of that kind — a single village as evidence of a prefecture-wide change — are exactly the material of Guyuan Television's rural-revitalisation coverage.

Beef cattle, potatoes and vegetables: the new farm economy

The industries that replaced subsistence struggle in Guyuan are specific, and they recur in local accounts of counties such as Xiji: beef cattle, potatoes, vegetables, cultural tourism and forestry and grass. Potatoes suited the cool mountain climate and became a major processed crop as well as a food staple; beef cattle gave mountain households a higher-value livestock income; and terraced vegetable fields turned the same slopes that once eroded into productive, irrigated plots where water projects made that possible.

For the flagship channel, agriculture programming in such a prefecture is service journalism. Planting and breeding decisions, cooperative organisation, processing, prices, roads to market and the weather over the Liupan range all bear directly on household income. The station record's pairing of agriculture with rural revitalisation is therefore precise: in Guyuan the farm economy is not a specialist niche, it is the prefecture's main economic story.

Converged media in a mountain prefecture

Guyuan's broadcaster now works integrated into the city's converged media centre — described in reporting on Ningxia's media reform as the Guyuan News Media Center, established on 10 January 2020, when Ningxia completed the merger of newspaper and radio and television operations in all five of its prefecture-level cities. Guyuan has since also launched an international communication centre in cooperation with China Daily, intended to present the city's scenery, heritage, customs and specialty agricultural products to audiences beyond China.

Convergence does not change the station's core obligation. A mountain prefecture with a famous revolutionary past and a recent escape from extreme poverty needs, first of all, reliable local news and practical information for its own residents. The converged centre lets that reporting travel further — from the flagship channel to digital platforms and, through the newer international work, occasionally to the world that heard Longwangba's story in Paris — without losing its local root.

Why Guyuan Television matters

Guyuan Television matters because Guyuan compresses two of modern China's most consequential stories into one prefecture. It is the place where the Central Red Army crossed Liupan Mountain in 1935 and where the Long March ended in victory in 1936; and it is the heart of Xihaigu, a region once declared among the most unfit for human settlement on earth, whose last county left the poverty list only in November 2020. The prefecture-level station is where those histories meet the present — in Mandarin news, agriculture and rural-revitalisation programmes made for the mountain counties that lived both stories.