About Hebi Television

Hebi Television

Overview

Hebi Television (Chinese: 鹤壁电视台) is the prefecture-level television station of Hebi, a compact city in northern Henan province, China. It is operated by the Hebi radio and television broadcaster within the city's converged media centre. Its flagship channel carries local news, livelihood, public-service and entertainment programmes in Mandarin for Hebi's districts and counties, including Qi County and Xun County.

Hebi is one of Henan's smaller prefectures, but its territory holds an outsized cultural treasure: Xun County, the ancient city of Liyang, preserves one of north China's greatest temple-fair traditions. The modern city, meanwhile, was built on coal and has spent recent decades diversifying. Hebi Television's schedule moves between pit-town industry and a thousand-year-old fairground, and both are home ground.

From coal city to new industries

Hebi developed as a coal city on the eastern foothills of the Taihang Mountains, its older urban core at Shancheng built around mining. As in other resource cities, the long agenda is transition: Hebi has diversified into electronics, magnesium metal — the area is a significant base for magnesium processing — and food processing, and has built a newer urban centre at Qibin.

Industrial coverage follows that arc: mine production and safety, the new materials and electronics firms, and the employment story of a city remaking its economy. For the station's audience, transition is not an abstract policy but the lived experience of neighbourhoods built by coal now finding new work.

Xun County and the ancient city of Liyang

Xun County, administered by Hebi, was known in antiquity as Liyang and carries a recorded history of more than two thousand years; in 1994 it was named a National Historical and Cultural City — the only county-level city in Henan to hold that title. Its old city keeps its Ming-era walls in a celebrated composition of two green mountains, a stream, and half the city wall set into the hillside, around Mount Dapi and Mount Fuqiu.

Two elements of Xun County's heritage carry World Heritage status: its section of the Sui–Tang Grand Canal and the great Liyang granary site beside it. Together with hundreds of protected sites across the county, they give Hebi's television a heritage beat of national significance, remarkable for so small a prefecture.

The great temple fair

Xun County's Spring Festival temple fair is famed as the First Great Ancient Temple Fair of North China. The tradition is traced back some 1,700 years; the Fuqiu Mountain fair of the first lunar month took shape in the Ming dynasty and flourished through the Qing. Today the county counts some 257 temple fairs a year, and the great January fair runs for more than half a month, drawing peak days of over 200,000 visitors.

The fair was a highlighted element in China's successful nomination of the Spring Festival to UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, inscribed in December 2024. The Zhongyuan (Hebi) Folk Culture Festival, built around the fair, opens each year in the old city with shehuo folk performances — lion dances, bamboo-horse dances, stilt and drum troupes — and for Hebi Television the fair season is the biggest production of its year, covered live and in features for weeks.

News and public affairs

News coverage centres on the municipal government, the development of the Qibin new area, and affairs across Hebi's districts — Qibin, Shancheng and Heshan — and its two counties, Xun and Qi. Public-affairs programming addresses the prefecture's programme of industrial transition, urban renewal in the old mining districts, and services for a population spread between the new city, the pit towns and the farming plain.

Qi County, the prefecture's other county, is associated in tradition with the last years of the Shang dynasty — the fief of Weizi — and its own historic sites add to the station's county coverage.

Livelihood programming

Livelihood strands handle the practical business of the prefecture: consumer affairs, employment, healthcare, schooling and community services. In the old mining districts, such programming also engages the legacy questions of resource cities — housing, heating, pensions and the environment of neighbourhoods built for another era.

Rural programming serves the agricultural plain of Xun and Qi counties, among Henan's productive grain country along the Wei River and the old canal route, with seasonal farming coverage and rural policy information.

Folk culture on screen

Folk culture is Hebi Television's signature material. The Xun County fairs concentrate an extraordinary range of living tradition — shehuo processions, temple theatre, folk dance, crafts and fairground food such as Liyang's steamed buns — and the prefecture has been officially recognised as a home of Chinese folk art and culture. The station documents that culture in depth, filming performances and interviewing the inheritors who keep them alive.

Such coverage matters beyond entertainment: temple fairs are the social and commercial high points of the county year, and television extends them to viewers who cannot attend, including Hebi people living away.

Tourism and the canal heritage

Tourism coverage follows the prefecture's growing visitor economy around Xun County's ancient city, the canal heritage sites and the folk festival, which in recent editions has drawn millions of visits across the Spring Festival season and generated substantial cultural-tourism revenue. The Night Tour of Liyang and the immersive events staged in the old city streets are recurring features.

The station's cameras present a small prefecture with a distinctive offer — not mountains or lakes, but the most vital surviving temple-fair culture of the North China Plain — and that presentation is itself part of the tourism product.

The festival's recent editions show its scale: the seventeenth Zhongyuan (Hebi) Folk Culture Festival opened in the ancient city in January 2025 with two dozen special cultural and tourism activities, from ancient-city drama and folk dance to a Hanlin banquet experience and a time-memory museum, and the event has been extended with night tours of Liyang, shehuo parades and lantern displays through the old streets. Organisers and local media present Xun County at festival time as a place to experience an authentic Chinese New Year, a reputation the station's coverage has helped to build.

The converged media centre

Hebi Television operates within the city's converged media centre, combining the prefecture's press, radio, television and new-media production. Television journalism supplies the centre's digital platforms, and fair-season coverage in particular circulates nationally online, where Xun County's festival has built a wide following.

The flagship channel remains the prefecture's broadcast service of record. Convergence suits a small prefecture: a single newsroom can cover the whole territory thoroughly, and distribute the results on every platform its residents use.

Language and audience

The station broadcasts in Mandarin to the Hebi prefecture — the new city districts, the old mining towns, and the counties of Xun and Qi. Its audience is among the smallest of Henan's prefecture stations, which gives its coverage an intimacy of scale: the fair, the mines and factories, and the county towns it reports are places its viewers know personally.

Scheduled viewing centres on evening news and the fair-season specials; younger residents and the away-from-home audience follow the converged centre's digital output, where the temple-fair films travel furthest.

Place in Henan's media landscape

Hebi Television is the local tier of Henan's media system for the province's compact northern prefecture. Its distinction is disproportion: a small station whose territory contains a World Heritage canal landscape and the most famous temple fair in north China, alongside a textbook resource-city transition story.

Day to day, it does what every prefecture station does — news, livelihood services and community record for its own people — but few can match the colour of its biggest annual assignment, when the ancient city of Liyang fills with two hundred thousand fairgoers a day.