About Huaihua Television

Huaihua Television

Overview

Huaihua Television is the prefecture-level television station of Huaihua in western Hunan, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now part of the Huaihua converged media centre. Its flagship channel broadcasts local news and cultural programming in Mandarin across a mountainous, multi-ethnic prefecture. Huaihua, where Hunan meets Guizhou, Guangxi and Chongqing, is a railway hub known for Dong and Miao culture, the Zhijiang surrender site of 1945 and Hongjiang ancient commercial town — all frequent subjects for the station.

No prefecture in Hunan is harder to hold in a single broadcast: Huaihua is a sea of mountains in which dozens of peoples live in river valleys days apart by older roads, unified in living memory by the railway that created its capital city. Huaihua Television is the connective medium of that territory — the shared screen of the Five Streams region — and its brief spans surrender memorials, Dong drum towers, Miao festivals and the freight yards of a great rail junction.

The city it serves

Huaihua is a prefecture-level city in western Hunan, bordering Guizhou to the west and Guangxi to the south, known since antiquity as the gateway to Guizhou and Yunnan and the throat of all Chu. Mountains occupy some seventy per cent of its territory, where the Wuling and Xuefeng ranges run and the Yuan River gathers its five streams — the Wu, Pushui, Chenshui, Xushui and Youshui of the old Wuxi, the Five Streams, from which the region took its ancient name. It administers Hecheng District and Zhongfang County together with a ring of counties and autonomous counties — Yuanling, Chenxi, Xupu, Huitong, Mayang Miao, Xinhuang Dong, Zhijiang Dong, Jingzhou Miao and Dong, Tongdao Dong and the city of Hongjiang.

The prefecture's population is a mosaic: Han alongside Dong, Miao, Yao, Tujia and many other peoples — some fifty ethnic groups in local counts — whose villages, languages and festivals fill the valleys. The urban seat, Hecheng, is itself a creation of the railways, grown from the small settlement of Yushu Bay where the lines met. A broadcaster serving Huaihua must speak to highland Dong villages, Miao mountain counties, ancient river towns and a young railway city at once.

The railway city

Huaihua's modern existence begins with steel rails. In the 1970s the Hunan-Guizhou (Xiangqian) railway and the Jiaozuo-Liuzhou (Zhiliu) railway were built through the mountains and crossed at Huaihua's Yushu Bay, chosen for its position at the meeting of routes to the southwest. The junction transformed a settlement of under half a square kilometre and little more than a hundred households into a regional central city for the borderlands of five provinces — in local telling, a city pulled in by train — with an urban area now of some sixty-seven square kilometres and a population around 660,000. Marshalling yards, depots and railway neighbourhoods shaped its society, and the high-speed era has added Huaihua South station on the Shanghai-Kunming and Zhangjiajie-Jishou-Huaihua lines, tightening the prefecture's grip on the southwest corridor.

Railway news is therefore civic news of the first order for this station: timetable and yard operations, the spring-festival travel peak through the junction, freight between the coast and the southwest, and the employment and identity of railway families. Transport coverage extends to the expressways and county roads that have since webbed the mountains, and to the Yuan River ports that preceded the rails — the prefecture's whole history is a history of routes, and its broadcaster reports routes as lifelines.

Zhijiang and the surrender of 1945

Huaihua holds one of the sacred sites of modern Chinese history. At Zhijiang, a Dong autonomous county west of the city, stood one of the largest Allied air bases in East Asia, defended by thousands of Flying Tigers personnel; and it was to Zhijiang that, after Japan announced its unconditional surrender, the Japanese delegation was ordered to fly. On 21 August 1945 the envoy Takeo Imai and his party landed at Zhijiang airfield, and in the meetings that followed — the surrender talks for the China theatre — a memorandum was signed setting the terms on which Japanese forces across China would be disarmed, ahead of the formal signing in Nanjing on 9 September. A memorial hall built in 1946 and the great surrender memorial arch preserve the site, described as China's only complex commemorating the victory of the War of Resistance in this way.

For Huaihua Television, Zhijiang is a standing beat of memory: anniversaries and commemorations at the memorial hall, the arch and the Flying Tigers heritage, school education and the testimony of the region's wartime generation. In the eightieth-anniversary year of the victory, renewed national attention on the site made the prefecture station the local chronicler of a story the whole country was retelling — a responsibility its cultural and news teams carry as custodians, not merely reporters.

Hongjiang, the merchant city

Down the Yuan River system stands Hongjiang ancient commercial city, in present-day Hongjiang city at Qiancheng — one of China's best-preserved Ming and Qing commercial towns, once called a little Nanjing of western Hunan and a metropolis of the southwest. On its bluestone lanes of seven alleys and eight streets survive the apparatus of a river-trade empire: escort agencies that guarded silver shipments, money shops and banks, tobacco and oil warehouses, guild halls, temples and the sunken courtyard houses of merchant families, built from the trade in tung oil, timber, medicines and goods moving between Hunan, Guizhou and the Yangtze.

Hongjiang gives the station a built heritage of commercial rather than official China — the counting-house counterpart to Zhijiang's memorial and the Dong villages' towers — and a working tourism economy to report: restoration of the merchant houses, visitor seasons, and the neighbouring old town of Qianyang, older in its fabric still, with its Furong Tower and the Tang poet Wang Changling's line about a heart pure as ice in a jade pot, written of this frontier posting. Together the river towns form the station's heritage spine along the Yuan.

Dong and Miao cultures

The prefecture's living cultures are its glory. The Dong people of Tongdao, Jingzhou and Zhijiang build the great drum towers and roofed wind-and-rain bridges — the Longjin bridge at Zhijiang, 384 metres long, among the longest of its kind — and sing the Grand Song, the multi-part choral singing inscribed by UNESCO, in villages such as Huangdu and Yutou where terraced lanes climb nine slopes of wooden houses. The Miao of Mayang and the mountain counties keep their embroidery, silverwork, flower belts and festival calendars; Yao and Tujia communities add their own traditions in the northern and western hills. Gaomiao, in the prefecture's south, adds prehistory: its Neolithic site produced some of the earliest white pottery known in China.

Cultural programming is thus the heart of Huaihua Television's distinctiveness. Its teams record Grand Song performances, drum-tower gatherings, Miao New Year and Dong festivals, bridge raisings and village rites — an audiovisual archive of cultures that exist in this form only in these valleys. For its minority audiences, such programming is representation: their own languages' songs, their own architecture and dress, on the prefecture's shared screen; for the prefecture as a whole, it is the common inheritance that binds the Five Streams together.

Mountains, rivers and the rural prefecture

Beyond the towns, Huaihua is a farming and forestry prefecture of steep valleys: rice terraces, citrus — Mayang's rock-sugar oranges are a noted brand — tea, tung and camellia oil, medicinal plants and the timber of the Xuefeng foothills. Rural reporting follows the mountain agricultural year, the out-migration and return of village labour, the roads, clinics and schools by which the prefecture has wired its valleys together, and the ecological protection of the Yuan's tributaries, whose gorges and reservoirs supply water and power downriver to Dongting.

The mountains also hold the prefecture's newer scenic economy: the Wanfo Mountain Danxia country in Tongdao, the gorges of the Xushui, and the ancient villages — Gaoyi among them, a Ming-founded settlement of lanes and halls — now receiving visitors. The station's features move along the valleys connecting these places, performing the integration its audience lives: a prefecture assembled from separate river worlds, presented nightly as one Huaihua.

The converged media centre

Huaihua Television operates within the Huaihua converged media centre, the integrated structure combining the city's radio, television and new-media production in one newsroom, following the national reform of prefecture broadcasting. In a mountain prefecture, convergence is the technology of unity: a Dong Grand Song recorded in Tongdao, a flood warning on the Yuan, a railway timetable change in Hecheng can each reach the whole prefecture — television, radio and phones in the valleys — from a single gathering operation, in a territory where no single channel of communication ever sufficed.

The centre's digital output extends the prefecture's cultures nationally: wind-and-rain bridges, merchant lanes and Zhijiang's arch circulate as short video to the tourism and heritage audiences Huaihua courts, while the flagship television channel remains the shared civic bulletin in which Hecheng and the eleven counties and cities see themselves as one prefecture.

Place in Hunan's media landscape

Huaihua Television is the prefecture voice of western Hunan, between the provincial media powerhouse in Changsha and the county media centres of the Five Streams, in a borderland whose outlook runs as much to Guizhou and Guangxi as to the provincial capital. Its distinction is the density of what it unites: the surrender ground of 1945, a Ming-Qing merchant city, the drum towers and Grand Song of the Dong, Miao mountain culture, and a capital city created by the crossing of two railways — all within one mountain prefecture. To report that world daily, in Mandarin and in the spirit of its peoples, is Huaihua Television's continuing work and its claim on the loyalty of the southwest's gateway.