About Hangzhou Net

Hangzhou Net

Overview

Hangzhou Net, published at hangzhou.com.cn and known in Chinese as Hangzhou Wang, is the digital news portal of the Hangzhou Daily Media Group in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province in eastern China. It publishes Hangzhou municipal news and city services online, and it functions as the Zhejiang capital's official online gateway for readers who want the city's own newsroom reporting rather than a provincial or national feed. That city-level identity is the essential point about Hangzhou Net. Zhejiang is a large and economically powerful province with its own provincial media system, including Zhejiang Online and the Chao News client, and Hangzhou Net is distinct from both of those services. Its remit begins and ends with Hangzhou itself: the decisions of the municipal authorities, the life of the city's districts, its transport, schools, hospitals and businesses, and the culture and landscape that have made the city famous across China and around the world.

As the online arm of a long-established newspaper group, Hangzhou Net carries the authority of the group's flagship title into digital publishing. Readers encounter through it the reporting tradition of Hangzhou Daily, the official newspaper of the Hangzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, presented in the continuously updated form that online news requires. For residents, for businesses operating in the city, for visitors planning a trip to West Lake, and for the many people elsewhere in China and abroad who follow Hangzhou because of its technology companies and its universities, the portal is a first point of reference for what is happening in the city on any given day.

Parent Group and the Hangzhou Daily Tradition

Hangzhou Net belongs to the Hangzhou Daily Press Group, also rendered in English as the Hangzhou Daily Media Group, the Party-run media conglomerate that operates the flagship Hangzhou Daily and the popular metro daily City Express. Hangzhou Daily itself was founded on 1 November 1955. Preparations had begun earlier that year, when on 18 April 1955 the Hangzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party established a preparatory committee for the newspaper, with Hu Jingwei, a member of the committee's standing committee and head of its publicity department, as its director. The paper that resulted serves as the official newspaper of the municipal Party committee, overseen by that committee and managed by the Hangzhou Daily newspaper group, and it is counted as the third official newspaper of a provincial-capital Party committee in China, after the Yangtze River Daily in Wuhan and Shenyang Daily.

That lineage matters for the portal. A newspaper founded in 1955 has reported on the whole modern history of its city, from the early decades of the People's Republic through reform and opening up to Hangzhou's emergence as a global technology centre. Anniversaries of the group continue to be marked at the highest level of the city: ahead of the group's 70th anniversary in 2025, the Hangzhou Party secretary Liu Fei visited the group, toured its AI Media Innovation Center and spoke about media convergence and the use of artificial intelligence to empower and increase efficiency in news production. The visit illustrates the position the group, and by extension its digital portal, occupies in the city's public life: it is the city's main newspaper group, expected both to report Hangzhou and to adopt the newest tools for doing so.

History and Development

The history behind Hangzhou Net is the history of a print institution learning to publish for a networked city. Through the second half of the twentieth century, Hangzhou Daily developed the features and special editions that tied it closely to local identity. In March 1992, for example, it launched a four-page folio section titled West Lake Weekend, later expanded to eight colour pages, a supplement devoted to the lake at the heart of the city's life. On 31 December 1999 the paper released its 100th commemorative edition to welcome the new century, divided into five sections and setting a record for the number of pages published by a Zhejiang newspaper in a single day. For the West Lake Expo of 2000 it produced first a 12-page colour edition on 20 October and then a special 128-page edition dedicated to the Expo, accompanied by a CD-ROM publication, an early sign of the multimedia direction in which the group would travel.

Hangzhou Net is the mature form of that direction. As Chinese readers moved first to desktop websites and then overwhelmingly to mobile devices, the group's city reporting moved with them, and the portal became the place where the group's newspapers are read online, where breaking municipal news appears first, and where city services and practical information are gathered in one address. The group's continuing investment in converged and AI-assisted production, visible in its AI Media Innovation Center, shows a publisher treating the digital operation not as an archive of the print paper but as the front line of its journalism.

Hangzhou: The City Behind the Portal

To understand Hangzhou Net's news agenda, it helps to understand Hangzhou. The city is the capital of Zhejiang Province and serves as the province's economic, cultural, scientific and educational hub. It is a significant cradle of Chinese civilisation and one of the seven ancient capitals of China, and it was among the first cities nationally recognised as a historical and cultural city. By the end of 2024 it had a permanent resident population of 12.624 million, with an urban population of 10.702 million and an urbanisation rate of 84.8 per cent, and in 2025 it achieved a gross domestic product of 2.3011 trillion yuan, growing 5.2 per cent year on year. Those figures describe a very large, prosperous and still-growing metropolis, and a city portal serving it must cover everything from municipal budgets and metro construction to property, employment and consumer news at corresponding scale.

Hangzhou is also a city the world knows. It is home to three UNESCO World Heritage sites: the West Lake Cultural Landscape, the Grand Canal, and the Archaeological Ruins of Liangzhu City. It hosted the G20 Summit on 4 and 5 September 2016, when President Xi Jinping positioned it as a historic and cultural city, an innovation hub and a capital of eco-civilisation. And it is a byword for China's internet economy: innovation giants and well-known enterprises such as Alibaba, Hikvision, Geely and NetEase originated here, newer technology companies nicknamed the Six Little Dragons of Hangzhou have been nurtured in the city, and it is home to 40 higher education institutions, including Zhejiang University and Westlake University. A Hangzhou newsroom therefore works at the intersection of heritage and high technology, and its portal reflects both.

News Coverage

The core of Hangzhou Net is municipal news: the work of the city government and Party committee, district-level developments across a sprawling municipality, and the public services that residents use every day. Around that core sits coverage shaped by the city's character. Economic and technology reporting follows the private-sector strength for which Zhejiang is known, including the e-commerce sector centred on Alibaba and the newer generation of Hangzhou technology firms. Culture and tourism reporting follows West Lake, the Grand Canal and Liangzhu, the museums and festivals that draw visitors, and major events in a city that has hosted both the G20 Summit and the Asian Games. Education coverage reflects the presence of Zhejiang University and dozens of other institutions, while science and innovation reporting tracks a city that ranks among the world's leading innovation clusters.

Because the portal belongs to the city's official newspaper group, its coverage also performs a record-keeping function. Announcements, policy documents and official accounts of major occasions appear there in authoritative form, which is one reason other media, researchers and businesses monitor city portals of this kind. At the same time, the metro-newspaper tradition within the group, represented by City Express, keeps the operation close to everyday urban concerns: commuting, food, neighbourhood change, weather on the lake and the small stories through which residents recognise their own city.

Digital Editions and Platforms

Hangzhou Net's primary platform is its website at hangzhou.com.cn, through which it publishes municipal news, city services and the group's newspaper editions online. The digital editions matter because they preserve the curated, paginated form of the group's print journalism for readers who no longer buy a paper copy, while the website's news channels update continuously between editions. This combination of a daily edition and a rolling news service is characteristic of China's city newspaper groups, and it allows one newsroom to serve both the reader who wants the whole day's Hangzhou in a single sitting and the reader who checks headlines on a phone several times a day.

The portal also sits within a wider group strategy of media convergence, the integration of traditional reporting with new technologies that the group's leadership publicly emphasises. The AI Media Innovation Center toured by the city leadership in 2025 is part of that strategy, applying artificial intelligence within news production. For readers, the practical result is a single Hangzhou brand encountered across web, mobile and social platforms, with the portal as its home address.

Organisation

Organisationally, Hangzhou Net is not a standalone start-up but a unit of a municipal newspaper group. Hangzhou Daily is overseen by the Hangzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and managed by the Hangzhou Daily Press Group, and the portal shares that governance. Its journalists work alongside the staff of the flagship daily and of City Express, drawing on the group's reporting, photography and design resources, and its content decisions reflect the responsibilities of an official city medium: accuracy on matters of public record, prominence for major municipal announcements, and sustained attention to the districts and public institutions of Hangzhou. The group is headquartered in Hangzhou itself, and its scale as the city's main newspaper group gives the portal an institutional permanence that purely commercial city websites do not have.

Audience and Reach

The natural audience of Hangzhou Net is, first, the population of Hangzhou itself, more than twelve and a half million permanent residents, the great majority of them urban. Beyond the city, the portal reaches readers across Zhejiang who follow the provincial capital, former residents and students who keep ties to the city, and a national and international audience whose interest in Hangzhou has grown with its technology companies, its universities and its global events. The G20 Summit of 2016 introduced Hangzhou to many overseas readers for the first time, and interest in the city's start-ups and in West Lake tourism has sustained that attention. For all of these audiences, an official city portal in Chinese remains the most direct source for Hangzhou news as the city itself publishes it.

Role in the Local Media Landscape

Hangzhou's media landscape is layered. At the provincial level, the Zhejiang Daily Press Group, established on 25 June 2000 around the provincial Party organ Zhejiang Daily, publishes for the whole province through services including Zhejiang Online and the Chao News client. National media and commercial platforms cover Hangzhou from outside. Hangzhou Net occupies the municipal layer of that landscape, and it is the only layer whose sole subject is the city. That position gives it a distinctive role: it is where Hangzhou speaks to itself, where municipal policy is published and explained, where district news too local for provincial media still receives professional coverage, and where the identity of the city, from West Lake to its newest technology parks, is recorded day by day.

Why Hangzhou Net Matters

Hangzhou Net matters because Hangzhou matters, and because a city of this size and significance needs a news institution of its own. A portal backed by a newspaper founded in 1955, operated by the city's main press group and devoted exclusively to the municipal story, provides continuity that aggregators and social feeds cannot. It connects the authority of Hangzhou Daily with the speed of online publishing, and it gives residents, businesses and observers a stable address, hangzhou.com.cn, at which the official life of the Zhejiang capital can be followed as it unfolds.