About Heze News Net

Heze News Net

An official local news portal

Heze News Net is the official online news portal serving Heze, a prefecture-level city in Shandong, China. Published in Chinese, it is the city's dedicated local news website, carrying government, economy, society, livelihood and culture news for Heze and its subordinate counties and districts. The portal is produced by Heze's converged media centre — the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting group — and works alongside the print Heze Daily: it republishes the newspaper's reporting, adds online-first local coverage, and carries local government service information for residents. This profile describes the portal, the city and prefecture it serves, the subjects it covers, and its place in Heze's media landscape.

Websites of this kind form the standard digital front door of a Chinese prefecture-level city. Where national portals cover Heze only when a story travels, and provincial media cover it as one prefecture among many, Heze News Net covers it every day, at county and district level, in the language of its readers. Its audience is first of all local: residents following decisions, services and events in their own city, readers in the prefecture's counties, and people from Heze living elsewhere who follow home news online. Everything the site publishes is framed by that local remit.

The city it serves: Heze in Shandong

Heze is a prefecture-level city in southwestern Shandong, on the Yellow River plain in the province's far south-west, formerly known as Caozhou. It is a largely agricultural prefecture whose flat, river-fed land supports grain and cotton farming as well as the flower cultivation for which it is nationally famous. The city is also promoted as a hometown of traditional opera, of painting and calligraphy, of martial arts and of folk arts, giving its cultural coverage a broader base than its best-known product alone.

That setting defines the portal's news geography. Its reporting area is the whole prefecture — the urban districts where the municipal government, the media centre and most employers sit, and the counties and county-level cities beyond them, whose farming, industry, schools and scenery supply much of the daily news. Weather, transport, public services and development projects matter to readers precisely because they play out across this whole territory, and the portal's structure, with channels and coverage organised around the prefecture and its parts, reflects it.

Economy coverage: the industries that shape local news

Peonies are Heze's defining industry. Cultivation began in the Sui dynasty, flourished under the Tang and Song, and by the Ming and Qing dynasties Heze was the national centre of peony growing; in March 2012 the China Flower Association officially named it the peony capital of China. The city counts 1,308 peony varieties in nine colour series and ten flower types, described as the world's largest peony planting, research and processing base. A full industrial chain has grown around the flower — seedlings, cut flowers and potted plants, and deep-processed products such as peony seed oil and peony tea exported to more than thirty countries and regions — alongside the prefecture's agricultural and energy-chemical development.

For Heze News Net, this material is not background colour but the daily economy beat: investment projects and industrial parks, the fortunes of leading local employers, agricultural prices and harvests, tourism revenue, and the prefecture's position in provincial and national development plans. Economy stories are typically among the most detailed on a portal of this type, because they draw on government releases, enterprise announcements and the reporting of the parent newspaper's business desk, and because they directly concern readers' jobs and incomes.

Culture, tourism and heritage reporting

The Heze International Peony Cultural Tourism Festival has been held since 1992 and now runs with the World Peony Conference as a month-long spring programme of flower viewing, trade talks, exhibitions and performances; Xinhua reported that the festival drew 9.92 million visitors in the year before its 2026 edition. The Caozhou Peony Garden is the best-known of more than ten ornamental peony gardens. Festival season dominates the portal's spring culture, tourism and economy coverage, while opera, calligraphy and painting, martial arts and the prefecture's intangible cultural heritage — including items at national and provincial level — fill its culture pages through the rest of the year.

Culture coverage on the portal also takes in the ordinary cultural life of the prefecture — museum exhibitions, local festivals, intangible cultural heritage protection, school and community arts, and the food and folk customs of its districts and counties. Together with scenery and heritage reporting, this gives the site a second identity beyond news: it is one of the main places where Heze presents itself, to its own residents and to potential visitors, in its own words.

What it publishes: government, society and livelihood news

The core of Heze News Net is the standard channel structure of a Chinese municipal news portal. Government and current-affairs channels carry the work of the municipal party committee and government, policy announcements, official appointments and the prefecture's major meetings and campaigns. Society channels carry the incidents and public-safety news of the prefecture — traffic, emergencies, courts and police reporting handled through official channels. Livelihood coverage, often the most read by local residents, covers education and school admissions, health care and hospitals, housing, prices, employment, social security and the practical service information — notices, guides and announcements — that residents need from local government.

County and district news extends the same structure downward, gathering reporting from across the prefecture so that a reader in an outlying county can find their own locality on the city's main site. Photo, video and special-report formats present major local events and themes, and the portal typically republishes selected provincial and national news from authorised sources for readers who use it as a general news homepage.

The converged media centre behind the site

Heze News Net is produced by Heze's converged media centre, the institution created in China's media-convergence reforms by merging the municipal newspaper group and the municipal radio and television broadcaster into a single local media organisation. The reform model, applied in prefecture-level cities across China, pools the journalists of the former newspaper and broadcast newsrooms so that a story can be gathered once and published across print, broadcast, web and mobile channels. The portal is the centre's web flagship within that system: the place where the combined newsroom's reporting appears in text-and-photograph form, updated through the day rather than on a print schedule.

In practice this means the site's content mixes several streams: reporting originated by the centre's own journalists, the digital edition of material prepared for the print newspaper, audiovisual material from the broadcast side of the centre repurposed for online readers, and authorised republication from provincial and national media. The result is a fuller local news service than any of the predecessor outlets could sustain online alone.

Distinct from the Heze Daily

The candidate record for this outlet stresses a distinction that matters for understanding it: Heze News Net is not simply the print Heze Daily under another name. The Heze Daily is the municipal party newspaper — a print publication with its own history, published on a daily cycle, carrying the authoritative record of municipal affairs. The portal carries that newspaper's reporting and functions as its online home, but it also publishes online-first coverage that never appears in print, updates stories as they develop, and presents government service information in formats designed for web and mobile use.

For researchers and readers, the distinction affects citation: a story found on Heze News Net may originate with the newspaper, with the broadcast newsroom of the converged centre, or with the portal's own online editors. The portal should therefore be cited as the publisher of record for its online content, with the Heze Daily treated as the related but separate print title of the same media group.

Government services and the portal's public function

Like other official municipal portals in China, Heze News Net performs a public-service function alongside its journalism. Local government service information — policy explainers, administrative notices, recruitment and examination announcements, public consultations and emergency information — is part of its stated remit in the candidate record, and in practice such material sits alongside news on its homepage and channels. During severe weather, public-health events or major local incidents, the portal is one of the channels through which the municipal authorities publish timely, authoritative information for residents.

This dual role — newsroom and official noticeboard — is characteristic of Chinese local media. It shapes the site's tone, which is authoritative and service-oriented, and its news judgement, which gives prominence to municipal priorities and public information. Readers use it accordingly: as a source not only for what has happened in Heze, but for what the city's government has decided, announced and made available.

Regulation, language and audience

Heze News Net publishes in Chinese, for a Chinese-speaking local audience; it does not maintain a foreign-language edition, and international readers encounter Heze more often through provincial or national English-language media than through the city's own portal. As a licensed local news website, it operates under China's internet news information service licensing system, administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China: news websites in China may publish and republish news only within the terms of their licences, and local portals of this type take their news content from their own licensed newsrooms and from authorised sources.

The audience is therefore deliberately local and regional. Its measures of success are not global reach but local penetration: whether residents of Heze's districts and counties turn to it for announcements, services and news, and whether it remains the reference point for the prefecture's affairs against competition from provincial portals, national news apps and social platforms, which distribute the centre's content further but do not replace its local newsroom.

Place in Heze's media landscape

Within Heze, Heze News Net occupies the top tier of local media: it is the web presence of the prefecture's official media centre, sitting above commercial local sites, self-media accounts and the social-media channels of individual government departments, and alongside the centre's own newspaper, broadcast and mobile products. Provincial media in Shandong and national media cover Heze selectively; the portal covers it comprehensively and continuously, and for many local topics — county news, service announcements, the detail of municipal policy — it is effectively the source of record from which other coverage derives.

That position makes the portal a useful primary source for anyone studying Heze: its pages record, day by day, how the prefecture governs itself, how its economy and industries change, and how it presents its culture and landscape to the world. As one of the standard official news portals of a Chinese prefecture-level city, Heze News Net is best understood as civic infrastructure as much as journalism — the online edition of record for Heze, Shandong.