About Hohhot Evening News

Hohhot Evening News

Hohhot Evening News (Chinese: 呼和浩特晚报; pinyin: Huhehaote Wanbao) was a Chinese-language evening newspaper published in Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China. It appeared in the reference lists of Chinese newspapers as Hohhot's evening title — rendered in the Wikipedia list of newspapers in China as the Hohhot Evening Post — and was published within the Hohhot and Inner Mongolia media system as the commercial evening companion to the city's official press. In January 2025 it was among the Chinese metropolitan newspapers reported to have ceased publication, in the annual wave of closures that has thinned China's city press over the past decade.

An evening paper for the regional capital

Evening newspapers occupied a defined place in China's press system: published by or alongside the official party newspaper of a city, they served general readers with city life, society and consumer news, in a lighter register than the parent party daily, and they lived commercially on advertising and street sales. The Hohhot Evening News filled that role for Hohhot, the seat of the Inner Mongolia regional government and the region's largest city. Its beat, as described in media directories, was the regional capital's city life and society, in a city and region where Chinese and Mongolian cultures meet and where public life runs in two scripts — a duality visible across Hohhot, from bilingual signage to metro station announcements made in Mongolian as well as Chinese.

Hohhot, the Blue City

The city the paper served began in the 1570s as a settlement founded under the Mongol khan Altan Khan. The Ming court gave the city the name Guihua, according to the Hohhot government's place-name record, while Mongols called it Köke Qota, the "blue city", according to the same record — the origin of Hohhot's enduring nickname. Under its later name Guisui it became the capital of Suiyuan Province in 1928; Japanese occupiers renamed it Houhe. The province was peacefully handed over on 19 September 1949, and in 1954 Suiyuan was folded into the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Guisui took back a transliteration of its Mongolian name as Hohhot, and the regional capital moved there from Ulanhot. The twentieth-century city survived a plague that killed thousands in 1917 and was joined to Beijing by rail in 1921. The evening paper's readers were the citizens of this layered city: a former frontier garrison and trading town turned regional capital.

The dairy capital as a news beat

Hohhot's modern economy gave its evening newspaper an unmistakable local subject: milk. In 1956 seven dairy farmers in the city's Hui District formed a cattle-raising group that grew into Yili, today one of China's largest dairy companies; on 28 August 2005 the China Dairy Industry Association named Hohhot "China's dairy capital". Yili's modern smart health valley processes 6,500 tonnes of raw milk a day, and the city's 13 medium and large plants handle 14,500 tonnes a day, the most of any large or medium Chinese city, according to Inner Mongolia News. The other dairy giant, Mengniu, has its headquarters in the Shengle Economic Park in Horinger, in Hohhot's orbit. Dairy prices, food safety, and the fortunes of the two hometown giants were staple material for a Hohhot city paper, alongside the green computing and artificial intelligence industries the region has promoted in recent years from conferences on the Cilechuan Grassland outside the city.

Place in Inner Mongolia's media system

Inner Mongolia's press is headed by the regional party organ, the Inner Mongolia Daily, published in Hohhot in Chinese and Mongolian, and the region's news is distributed nationally through the Inner Mongolia News Network, based in Hohhot. Within that system the Hohhot Evening News was the capital's commercial evening title: the paper a resident bought for city news rather than the paper an official read for directives. That two-tier structure — an authoritative party daily above, a market-facing evening paper below — was the standard arrangement in Chinese provincial capitals, and in the advertising boom years the evening papers' revenues commonly helped support their parent publications. The structure's weakness was the mirror image of its strength: when the advertising and circulation market collapsed, it was the evening and metropolitan titles, not the party organs, that were exposed.

The great contraction of China's city press

The China Media Project's February 2025 survey of the closures, "The Slow Close of an Era", set out the environment in which the Hohhot Evening News ended. China's latest official internet report counted more than one billion internet users, of whom nearly 98 per cent used online video services. Newspaper and magazine closures had become an annual ritual over the past decade; most commercial print publications in China were spin-offs of local party outlets — "child papers" — whose revenues in the boom years supported their CCP parent publications, until the bottom fell out of the advertising market in the mid-2010s with the emergence of powerful digital competitors such as WeChat. By contrast, the country's "parent papers", on which the party at every level relies, remained immune from the changes, because their identity is political, not commercial. The closures were confined almost entirely to the metropolitan dailies that had distinguished China's press environment from the early 1990s through to the 2010s.

Closure in January 2025

The Hohhot Evening News ceased publication in the round of closures reported in January 2025. The China Media Project listed it among that season's quiet exits, alongside the Yunnan Economic Daily in Kunming, Tianjin's Daily News — a commercial paper launched a quarter-century earlier under the Tianjin Daily — and the Xijiang Metropolitan Daily of Wuzhou in Guangxi, launched in 2000 as a spin-off of the Wuzhou Daily. In the same season Beijing Youth Daily and Liaoning's Liaoshen Evening News announced they would drop their weekend editions, and Tibet's Tibet Business News announced a move to digital-only operation. No separate announcement marked the Hohhot paper's end beyond its inclusion in these reports: like most of its generation, it closed quietly, outside the headlines.

What its record shows

The surviving English-language record of the Hohhot Evening News is thin — a listing among Inner Mongolia's newspapers, its place in the Hohhot media system, and its documented closure — and that thinness is itself characteristic of China's prefectural and capital-city evening press, whose work was intensely local and rarely documented abroad. What can be said on the record is that Hohhot was served for years by a dedicated evening newspaper in the standard Chinese metropolitan pattern; that it reported a bilingual frontier capital that became China's dairy capital; and that it ceased publication in January 2025 as part of the nationwide contraction that has ended most of China's commercial city newspapers while leaving the official party dailies in place. The Inner Mongolia Daily and the region's official news network continue to publish from Hohhot.

Hohhot Evening News at a glance

To summarise the verified record: the Hohhot Evening News (Huhehaote Wanbao, 呼和浩特晚报), also listed in English as the Hohhot Evening Post, was a Chinese-language evening newspaper published in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, within the city's official media system, covering the regional capital's city life and society. It ceased publication in the closure round reported in January 2025, documented by the China Media Project among the metropolitan titles that ended that season.