About Hualong Net

Hualong Net

Hualong Net, published at cqnews.net and also known in English as CQNEWS.net, is Chongqing's provincial-level key news website and the municipality's first portal news website. Set up on 20 December 2000 with the approval of the State Council Information Office, it operates under the direction of the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China Chongqing Municipal Committee, and in 2009 it was merged with CBN.cn under the Chongqing Daily News Group, the Chongqing Broadcasting Group and the Chongqing State-owned Cultural Assets Management Company. Hualong Net describes itself as Chongqing's only website with news interview rights, and its own introduction records a publishing volume of more than 6,000 news items uploaded every day. For readers outside China, its English service, CQNEWS English, is the main window through which Chongqing's official news reaches an international audience.

Founding in 2000

Hualong Net's own introduction dates its establishment precisely: on 20 December 2000, with the approval of the State Council Information Office, a key news website at provincial level was set up in Chongqing — CQNEWS.net. The date places Hualong Net in the first generation of China's official news websites, created at the moment when provincial and municipal authorities across the country were building authorised online gateways to stand alongside the fast-growing commercial portals. Its status was regulatory as well as editorial: a "key news website" in the Chinese system is a licensed, officially recognised publisher, and approval by the State Council Information Office marked Hualong Net out as Chongqing's designated online news institution. Chongqing itself had only become a direct-controlled municipality, separate from Sichuan, in 1997, so the new portal was part of building the young municipality's own media institutions. Hualong Net presents itself as Chongqing's first portal news website, the original online home of the municipality's mainstream media.

The 2009 merger and ownership

The second defining event in Hualong Net's history came in 2009. Under the direction of the Publicity Department of the CPC Chongqing Municipal Committee, CQNEWS.net was merged with CBN.cn in 2009 by three owners acting together: the Chongqing Daily News Group, the Chongqing Broadcasting Group and the Chongqing State-owned Cultural Assets Management Company. That ownership structure is unusual and informative. Most Chinese provincial portals belong to a single newspaper group; Hualong Net was deliberately constituted as a joint asset of the municipality's newspaper group, its broadcasting group and its state cultural-assets manager. The merger with the broadcasting side's web operation turned the portal into the shared digital front door of Chongqing's mainstream media as a whole — newspapers and broadcasters alike — rather than the website of one title. It also explains the portal's self-description as a multimedia operation combining the roles of newspaper, radio and television rather than a text-only news site.

Chongqing's first portal and its interview rights

Two claims in Hualong Net's own introduction define its institutional position. The first is that it developed into Chongqing's first portal news website, combining, in its words, the roles of newspaper, radio, TV, mobile phone news, 3G, mini blog and outdoor LED advertising — a list that captures the multimedia ambitions of Chinese official portals in the first decade of the century, when a key news website was expected to be a platform business and not only a newsroom. The second is that, as Chongqing's only website with news interview rights, it holds a status no other site in the municipality has: in China's licensing system, the right to conduct original news interviews, rather than merely republish material from licensed sources, is restricted, and Hualong Net's possession of it makes it the municipality's sole fully empowered online news gatherer. Its stated mission follows from that status: to act as mainstream media, to take mainstream-media responsibility, and to promote Chongqing to the outside world.

Publishing volume and daily operation

Hualong Net quantifies its own operation in its official introduction. More than 6,000 pieces of news are uploaded to CQNEWS each day, among them more than 90 original comments, which the site itself renders as an average of 4.2 pieces every minute. Those figures describe an aggregation-and-production machine of considerable size: the daily flow combines the output of Chongqing's newspapers and broadcasters, national and wire material, and the portal's own reporting and commentary. The figure for original comments is the detail that distinguishes the operation from a pure aggregator — commentary is where an official portal speaks in its own voice, and producing dozens of original comment pieces a day indicates a staffed opinion operation alongside the news desk. A flow of this scale, sustained by the combined newsrooms of the Chongqing Daily News Group and the broadcasting group, is what allows Hualong Net to function as the default first screen for Chongqing news: whatever happens in the municipality, in any district, is expected to appear on cqnews.net quickly and in depth.

Digital newspapers and group content

The portal's content base is the combined output of Chongqing's mainstream press. Its introduction highlights its digital newspaper services carrying seven titles, including Chongqing Daily, Chongqing Evening News, Chongqing Morning Post and Chongqing Commercial Daily. Those four named papers map the structure of the city's newspaper market: the party daily, the evening paper, the pioneering morning paper and the business paper, all published within the Chongqing Daily orbit and all flowing through the one portal. Later industry reporting on the Chongqing Daily Newspaper Group's media system describes a new media cluster led by Hualong.com within the group's integrated structure, alongside the party newspaper cluster led by Chongqing Daily and the metropolitan cluster led by Upstream News. Hualong Net's role in that architecture is the group's web foundation: the portal, the digital editions and the licensed news gateway on which the group's more specialised digital brands also depend.

The English service

Hualong Net maintains an English-language service, CQNEWS English, at english.cqnews.net, through which Chongqing news is translated and presented to international readers. The English channel carries the municipality's political, economic and social news — government meetings, industrial development, transport projects, culture and tourism — typically in translations credited to professional language services, and its news pages show a continuous daily flow of Chongqing stories in English. This outward-facing function is written into the portal's founding mission of promoting Chongqing to the outside world. For international readers, researchers and businesses with interests in south-western China, CQNEWS English is one of the few sustained English windows on a municipality of more than thirty million people whose own media market is otherwise almost entirely Chinese-language. The English service also republishes explanatory and feature material about Chongqing's role in national strategies such as the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle and the New Western Land-Sea Corridor.

Publishing business and industry standing

Hualong Net is also a significant publishing business in its own right. A Chongqing digital publishing industry report recorded that Hualong.com's online publishing revenue surpassed 100 million yuan, reaching 195 million yuan, an increase of 15.4 per cent, in the period it surveyed — making the portal one of the city's leading online publishing service enterprises by revenue. That commercial record matters to the portal's history because China's key news websites were expected, from the listing-reform era onward, to develop real businesses around their licensed status: advertising, publishing services and digital content operations built on the traffic their news authority attracts. Within Chongqing's media industry, Hualong Net's standing is that of the establishment platform — the mainstream-media portal against which the municipality's newer, app-centred brands such as Upstream News define themselves, and the institution that carries the group's formal responsibilities as licensed publisher of record.

Talent development: the Hualong New Media School

Hualong Net's role extends into media education. Chongqing Technology and Business University announced the establishment of the Hualong New Media School, jointly invested by the university and CQ News Net, describing CQ News Net as a mainstream medium of Chongqing with a national reputation in new media. Under the collaboration, the two partners work together on journalism curriculum design, teaching material development, and faculty and student practice and internships, with nationally known new media enterprises taken in as training bases and support offered for student entrepreneurship through incubation platforms and financial backing. The university stated the joint aim of developing the school into a well-known institution for cultivating new media talent and a new media training base in western China. The venture is a characteristic move for a key news website of Hualong Net's generation: converting practical newsroom capability into a training institution that supplies the region's media industry with digitally skilled graduates, and anchoring the portal's influence in the professional pipeline as well as in daily publishing.

Hualong Net today

Today Hualong Net remains what its founding documents made it: Chongqing's official online news gateway. From its base at cqnews.net it publishes the combined journalistic output of the municipality's newspaper and broadcasting groups at a self-reported rate of thousands of items a day, holds the interview rights that make it the city's only fully licensed online news gatherer, operates digital editions of the city's seven newspaper titles, runs an English service for international readers, and sustains a publishing business whose online revenue has been measured in the hundreds of millions of yuan. Around it, Chongqing's media system has added faster, younger app brands, but the architecture still rests on the portal created on 20 December 2000. For anyone seeking the authoritative, official record of Chongqing — its government, its districts, its economy and its public life — Hualong Net is the source of first resort, and the institution through which the municipality speaks to the internet.