About Hainan Daily

Hainan Daily

Hainan Daily, known in Chinese as Hainan Ribao, is the official newspaper of the Hainan Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, published in Chinese in Haikou, the capital of China's island province of Hainan. It was established on 7 May 1950 under the name New Hainan Post and took its present name in 1958. Since July 2004 it has been the flagship of the Hainan Daily Press Group, the provincial media group that also publishes the Nanguo Metropolis Daily and operates the hinews.cn news service, the South China Sea Network and the New Hainan mobile client. The newspaper's history is closely bound up with the island it serves: it was founded two years after the Communist takeover of Hainan in 1950, it launched an overseas edition in 1991 to explain the Hainan Special Economic Zone to readers in Southeast Asia, and its group now presents itself as the authoritative information platform of the Hainan Free Trade Port. It was named to the national list of China's top 100 newspapers and periodicals for 2017.

Identity and Role as the Provincial Party Organ

Hainan Daily is formally the organ newspaper of the Hainan Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, a status recorded in its own introduction and in reference tables of Communist Party newspapers, where it appears as Hainan's provincial-level party paper. It is a Chinese-language daily newspaper, published from Haikou, and its publisher is the Hainan Daily Press Group. As a provincial party organ, its core function is to publish the policies and decisions of the provincial party committee and provincial government for readers across the island province. Because Hainan was administered as part of Guangdong until it became a separate province in 1988, the newspaper's institutional life spans two different provincial arrangements: it began as the party paper for Hainan when the island was still a Guangdong administrative region, and it continued as the organ of the new Hainan Provincial Committee after 1988. Its website is hndaily.cn, where its digital edition is published.

Founding as New Hainan Post in 1950

The newspaper was established on 7 May 1950, in the immediate aftermath of the Hainan Island campaign that brought the island under People's Republic control in the spring of that year. It did not, however, begin under its present name. The paper was first published as the New Hainan Post, in Chinese Xin Hainan Bao, a founding name recorded in the Chinese News Practical Dictionary and in the press group's own introduction. The choice of a "new Hainan" title followed the pattern of several party newspapers founded in 1949 and 1950, which marked the political break with the old order in their very names. The founding date and original name are documented in the Hainan Provincial History, published by the Hainan Provincial History Office through the South China Sea Publishing Company in 1993, which remains the standard citation for the paper's establishment. For its first eight years the future Hainan Daily appeared as the New Hainan Post, building the party press on an island whose modern newspaper history effectively began with its arrival.

Renaming to Hainan Daily in 1958

In 1958 the New Hainan Post was renamed Hainan Daily, the name it has carried ever since. The change, recorded in the newspaper's own published introduction, dropped the revolutionary-era "new" from the title once the new order on the island was firmly established, aligning the paper's name with the standard form used by provincial party newspapers across China — the name of the province followed by "Daily". Under that name the paper continued as the Hainan party committee's organ through the following decades, including the long period in which Hainan remained administratively subordinate to Guangdong. When Hainan was separated from Guangdong and established as a province and special economic zone in 1988, Hainan Daily was already in place as the island's established party newspaper, and it became the organ of the newly created Hainan Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party without any change of title.

The Overseas Edition and the Special Economic Zone

The creation of the Hainan Special Economic Zone in 1988, then the largest such zone in China, gave the newspaper an outward-facing task that most provincial party papers never had. In January 1991 Hainan Daily launched the Hainan Daily Overseas Edition, an edition produced for an overseas audience. Its coverage focused on Southeast Asia, the region with the closest historic and commercial ties to the island, and its purpose was to introduce the policies of the Hainan Special Economic Zone and the island's investment environment to readers abroad. The edition is recorded in the China Publishing Yearbook for 1992 and in the Introduction to China Export Newspapers and Periodicals published by the China International Book Trading Corporation in 1993, the standard guide to Chinese publications distributed overseas. The overseas edition made Hainan Daily an instrument of the zone's opening-up publicity as well as of domestic party communication, a dual role that anticipated the group's much larger international-facing digital operations three decades later.

Formation of the Hainan Daily Press Group in 2004

Following the reform and opening up era's restructuring of the Chinese press, Hainan Daily was corporatised in July 2004 and became part of the newly formed Hainan Daily Press Group. The group's own introduction dates its assumption of the newspaper to that month. The reorganisation placed the party organ at the head of a provincial newspaper group, the model adopted across China in the early 2000s, in which the party paper's publishing house operates subsidiary commercial titles and digital services alongside the flagship. English-language reference summaries describe the July 2004 change as a privatisation of the paper into the group; institutionally, it meant that Hainan Daily ceased to stand alone and became the flagship of the Hainan Daily Press Group, which remains its publisher today. The group is headquartered with the newspaper in Haikou.

Sister Title: Nanguo Metropolis Daily

The group's best-known subsidiary is the Nanguo Metropolis Daily, a Haikou-based Chinese-language daily that is formally a sub-paper of Hainan Daily, sponsored and supervised by the Hainan Daily Newspaper Industry Group and published by the Nanguo Metropolis Daily Agency. It was launched on 1 January 2001 and was the first metropolitan newspaper in Hainan, created to serve urban readers in a market-oriented format distinct from the party organ's official register. According to a poll by China Central Television cited in reference accounts, the Nanguo Metropolis Daily holds the largest share of the newspaper market in Hainan, and in 2009 it was rated among the top ten most innovative metropolitan newspapers in China. Its digital edition is published at szb.ngdsb.cn. Reference works on Hainan's press routinely pair the two titles — Hainan Daily as the provincial party organ and the Nanguo Metropolis Daily as the island's other major daily — and the two newsrooms were later joined operationally in running the group's New Hainan client.

Digital Beginnings: From Newspaper Website to South China Sea Network

The group's online history is documented in unusual detail by its own anniversary reporting. Twenty-five years after its birth, the group's news site recalled that it originated in a decision by Hainan Daily to build an online edition of the newspaper as the internet reached China. On 1 July 2001 the Hainan Daily online edition was renamed the Hainan News Network, formally becoming a news website in its own right — described in the anniversary account as the extension of the party newspaper, and one of the earliest explorations of internet news in Hainan. On 18 July 2006 the site was renamed again, becoming the South China Sea Network, hinews.cn, a large portal covering the province online and offline. The group also operates the newspaper's own site at hndaily.cn. In English-language reference entries the group's online news service is identified as hinews.cn, published in simplified Chinese, and it is recorded that in 2009 the service won a national prize for innovative website development — an early national recognition of the provincial group's digital work.

Hinews Media and the New Hainan Client

The digital operation grew into a company in its own right. Hainan Hinews Media Co, the group's new-media arm, is described in international trade reporting as Hainan's leading media house and a state-owned cultural enterprise listed on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations, China's "New Third Board". Across its three major media platforms its audience was reported to exceed seventeen million, and its Facebook account alone had more than one hundred thousand overseas users, making it a mainstream communication platform for the Hainan Free Trade Port. The centrepiece product is the New Hainan client, the provincial converged-media mobile application developed and built by the Hainan Daily Press Group's South China Sea Network and jointly operated by the network and the Nanguo Metropolis Daily. The client carries more than fifty channels and columns, is positioned as the authoritative information-release platform of the Hainan Free Trade Port and as the province's media-convergence coordination platform, and by 2021 its reporting noted more than two million downloads. Hinews was also the first mainstream medium in Hainan to launch a dedicated duty-free channel, reflecting the island's offshore duty-free policy, and its hosts front the group's English-language "This is Hainan" audio news programme, the Voice of Hainan.

Recognition and Continuing Role

Hainan Daily's standing in the national press system was confirmed in 2018, when it was selected into the recommended list of the national Top 100 newspapers and periodicals for 2017, the same honours list that recognised most of China's leading provincial party papers. Within Hainan, the newspaper remains the provincial committee's organ and the anchor of a group whose reach now extends from the print flagship and its metropolitan sister to a listed new-media company and a provincial mobile platform. Its trajectory — a 1950 founding as the New Hainan Post, the 1958 adoption of its present name, an overseas edition explaining a special economic zone in 1991, group corporatisation in 2004, an award-winning news website, and its present role publicising the Hainan Free Trade Port — makes Hainan Daily a compact record of how a small island province's party newspaper adapted to each successive stage of China's opening.