About Huaibei News Net

Huaibei News Net

Huaibei News Net is the official online news portal serving Huaibei, a prefecture-level city in northern Anhui Province, China. Published in Chinese, it carries local government, economy, society, livelihood and culture news for Huaibei and its subordinate districts and county, and it is the city's dedicated local news website, produced by Huaibei's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting group. It is distinct from the print Huaibei Daily newspaper, whose reporting it carries alongside online-first local coverage and local government service information. Local news websites of this type operate under the internet news information service licensing system administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China.

The city behind the portal calls itself the coal city of a hundred miles. Huaibei is a young industrial city raised on coal at the junction of four provinces, yet the land beneath it is old: a Shang dynasty ancestor is said to have founded a city at the foot of Xiang Mountain more than four thousand years ago, and the Sui and Tang Grand Canal once made its Liuzi pier a trading town. A portal for Huaibei therefore reports on a place in the middle of a deliberate transformation — from energy base to a greener city of wetland parks built, literally, on worked-out mines.

The portal and its place in Huaibei media

Huaibei News Net sits at the digital centre of the city's official media system. In China's prefecture-level media structure, municipal newspaper and broadcasting organisations have in recent years been merged into converged media centres that publish across print, broadcast, web and mobile channels from a single newsroom. Huaibei's centre works in that pattern, and the news net is its web flagship: the place where the reporting of the city's journalists appears first, is updated through the day, and is archived in searchable form.

The portal is distinct from Huaibei Daily, the print newspaper of the same media group. The daily remains a printed product with a fixed edition, while the news net carries the same newsroom's reporting in rolling form, adds online-first local stories, and republishes government notices and service information that residents need between editions — policy announcements, examination and recruitment notices, weather warnings for the Huai plain, and community news from the mining districts. For readers inside Huaibei, the site functions as the city's public noticeboard as much as its newspaper, and for the many Huaibei families whose working lives were spent in the pits, it is the record of what the city is becoming as the coal era recedes.

Three districts and one county on the Huai plain

Huaibei administers three districts — Xiangshan, the municipal seat, Duji and Lieshan — and one county, Suixi, across about 2,741 square kilometres in the northeast of Anhui, at the junction of Jiangsu, Shandong and Henan. The 2020 census recorded a population of 1,970,265, down from 2,114,276 in 2010, a decline that reflects both the coal industry's contraction and the out-migration common across northern Anhui. The prefecture is divided into 43 township-level units of towns, townships and subdistricts, and the portal's local coverage is organised around that compact map: three urban districts built around the mining field, and Suixi, the large agricultural county to the south and west that holds most of the prefecture's farmland and much of its history.

The terrain is mostly the flat Huanghuai plain, broken by low hills — Xiangshan above the city and the Longji range — and by the Sui River. Huaibei describes itself as the Anhui city closest to the sea, some 200 kilometres from the port of Lianyungang, and it is a member of the Yangtze River Delta urban agglomeration despite its northern position. Longhai railway connections to the north and the Beijing–Shanghai line to the east frame its transport reporting, alongside the freeways that tie the mining city to Xuzhou, Bengbu and the provincial capital, Hefei.

Xiangtu, the canal and an old land

Huaibei was formerly known as Xiangcheng, Xiang City, after Xiangtu, the eleventh-generation ancestor of Tang, founder of the Shang dynasty, who is said in the Book of Songs tradition to have established a city at the southern foot of Xiang Mountain in the twenty-first century BC. Human settlement here reaches back to the Neolithic, and the area has produced fine Han dynasty stone reliefs and Tang and Song porcelain. In the Sui and Tang dynasties the Grand Canal passed through the area, and the discovery of the Liuzi pier site proved, in the assessment of provincial introductions to the city, that Huaibei was a major commercial town some 1,400 years ago, handling traffic on the longest and earliest canal in the world.

The wine culture is nearly as old. Suixi tradition traces brewing to the Shang period, and the ruins excavated there have been described as China's largest ancient winery workshop site; the county's Kouzi liquor remains one of Anhui's four famous listed baijiu brands. Xiangshan Temple, with roots in the Tang dynasty, and the Suixi Confucian temple survive as landmarks of the older, pre-industrial Huaibei. For the portal's culture desk, that deep past is a working asset: canal heritage, Han reliefs and wine culture are the materials from which a coal city builds a tourism identity, and they recur in its culture and heritage reporting.

The coal city

Modern Huaibei, however, was built by coal in a single generation. The Anhui authorities approved preliminary planning for the Huaibei mining area in November 1957, preparatory offices for the Suixi and then Huaibei mines were set up in 1958, and on 22 March 1959 the State Council decided to abolish Suixi County and establish a mining city in its place; the city later took the name Huaibei, north of the Huai. The coalfield's estimated reserves were put at 8.4 billion tons, with prospective reserves of 35 billion tons, in prized coking and bituminous grades rare in China, and Huaibei became the biggest energy base in east China, with large thermal power plants and pillar industries in coal, power, textiles, liquor and building materials.

At its height the city hosted more than 2,000 industrial enterprises, 22 of them large and medium-sized state-run firms. That inheritance defines the portal's economy coverage to this day: production and safety at the remaining pits, the power stations, and above all the transition programme of a designated resource-based city whose seams are depleting. Recent provincial reporting follows Huaibei's pivot into aluminium-based new materials — 68 above-scale enterprises in aluminium-based high-end metal materials and auto parts, dozens of new projects signed, a provincial research institute for aluminium-based new materials approved — a deliberate attempt to build the next pillar industry before the old one fades.

Lakes where the mines sank

Coal left Huaibei a second landscape: land that subsided as the seams beneath it were removed, flooding into lakes across the urban area. The city's recent development has turned that liability into its signature. Subsided mining land has been redeveloped as urban wetland parks — the Nanhu wetland among them — so that districts once scarred by extraction now front onto water, boardwalks and bird habitat. Research on north Anhui mining areas records that Huaibei achieved the highest subsidence-governance rate of the region's cities, at 51.3 per cent of its subsidence area treated, with much of the stabilised land in the Huaibei mining area already reclaimed.

For the portal, this is livelihood news as much as environment news. Resettlement of villages affected by subsidence, the flooding and draining of farmland in Suixi, fishing and lotus planting on the new lakes, and the property market of a city whose newest districts overlook water all pass through its pages. The green transformation also drives its science coverage: the city's first local regulation specifically promoting scientific and technological innovation was issued recently, and its government work report counts dozens of new innovation platforms. Huaibei News Net reports the transition in practical form — a wetland opened, a battery-foil plant expanded, a subsided village rehoused — because for its readers the transition is not an abstraction but the street they live on.

Government, society and livelihood coverage

The everyday core of Huaibei News Net is municipal: meetings and policy documents of the city government, budgets and development plans, and provincial and national policy implemented at street level in Xiangshan, Duji, Lieshan and Suixi. Livelihood reporting covers heating and utilities on the cold northern plain, pensions and medical insurance in a city with a large retired mining workforce, school admissions, old-compound renovation and employment services for workers leaving shrinking pits. Society coverage follows public safety, traffic, courts and community affairs, from food-safety inspection campaigns in Duji to rural collective-asset supervision in Lieshan — the kind of district-level governance stories that fill its local pages.

Culture and tourism coverage works the seam between the two Huaibeis: the Xiangshan park and temple, the Linhuan ancient town and canal sites in Suixi, the coal-mining museum record of the industrial century, and the dragon-boat and food festivals of the plain. Economy reporters, meanwhile, track both ends of the transition at once — coal and power output from the old base, and aluminium, battery materials and high-tech investment, which provincial reporting noted grew 80.2 per cent year on year in high-tech industries in the first three quarters of a recent year.

Reading Huaibei through its portal

For an outside reader, Huaibei News Net is the most direct window on how a Chinese resource city manages the end of the resource era with its population slightly shrinking and its landscape literally reshaped by extraction. National coverage visits for the transformation story; the portal records the unglamorous continuity in between — a subsidence lake stocked, a mining family rehoused, an aluminium line commissioned in Suixi, a Han relief conserved. Read over time, its news list is a ledger of that transition, kept by the institution charged with telling the city's story to itself.

Why Huaibei News Net matters

Huaibei News Net matters because Huaibei's experiment is watched well beyond Anhui: whether a coal city of two million can replace its founding industry, heal land that sank into lakes, and hold its people while it does so. Its portal carries that experiment in daily detail for the prefecture's residents as their primary local news source, from the Xiangshan municipal seat to the farm towns of Suixi. In the WorldNM directory it stands as the online news entry for Huaibei, Anhui — the official voice of the coal city of a hundred miles, reporting its own reinvention as it happens.