About Huludao Television

Huludao Television

Overview

Huludao Television is the municipal television station of Huludao on the Liaodong Bay coast of southwestern Liaoning, run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within its converged media centre. Its main channel broadcasts local news, livelihood and tourism programming in Mandarin. Huludao, formerly Jinxi, is a port and petrochemical city known for swimwear manufacturing at Xingcheng, the Xingcheng ancient city and the Jiumenkou Great Wall, all frequent subjects of the station's output.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. The documented position — municipal broadcaster, converged media centre, main channel carrying news, livelihood and tourism programming in Mandarin — and the balance its record describes between a port and petrochemical economy and an unusually rich Ming-dynasty and Great Wall heritage, are the factual foundation of this profile.

A port city on Liaodong Bay, formerly Jinxi

Huludao stands in southwestern Liaoning on the coast of Liaodong Bay, the northern arm of the Bohai Sea. The city was formerly known as Jinxi, a name older residents and older records still carry, and its modern identity is built around the sea: a working port, petrochemical industry along the coast, beaches and islands offshore, and county-level cities and counties inland that look to Huludao as their prefecture centre.

That geography shapes the audience of the municipal station. A Huludao bulletin has to serve port and refinery workers, fishing and coastal communities, swimwear factory districts, farmers in the inland counties and visitors drawn to the shore in summer. Few prefecture stations in Liaoning cover a territory in which heavy industry and seaside tourism sit so close together, and the station record reflects that pairing directly, placing port and petrochemical Huludao alongside Xingcheng's swimwear, ancient city and Great Wall as its recurring subjects.

The main channel and local programming

The main channel broadcasts local news, livelihood and tourism programming in Mandarin. News is the core of a municipal station's mandate: decisions of the city government, port and industrial development, public services, weather and sea conditions on a working coast, and the everyday concerns of districts and counties across the prefecture.

Livelihood programming — the practical, service-oriented strand of Chinese municipal television — connects that news agenda to daily life: employment, housing, transport, markets and consumer affairs in a port city whose economy brings shift work, logistics and seasonal tourism employment together. Tourism programming, explicitly named in the station record, is the third strand, and in Huludao it has exceptional material to work with, from Xingcheng's beaches and ancient city to a Great Wall that stands in a river.

Within the city's converged media centre, television is produced alongside radio and new-media output by the same broadcaster. For a prefecture whose best-known places — Xingcheng, the Jiumenkou wall, the Liaodong Bay shore — lie outside the urban centre itself, convergence helps one newsroom carry reporting from across the whole territory to broadcast and digital audiences together, while the main channel remains the common screen for Huludao as a whole.

Xingcheng swimwear: an industry made by the sea

Xingcheng, the county-level city under Huludao, is one of China's great swimwear manufacturing centres. The industry began there in the 1980s, growing from local workshops into a cluster of factories whose swimsuits are sold across China and exported around the world. In 2010 Xingcheng was awarded the title of China Swimwear City, formal recognition of a trade that had become the city's signature.

Recent reports credit Xingcheng with roughly 38 to 40 percent of China's domestic swimwear market and around a quarter of the global market, and describe it as one of China's three major swimwear production bases. Those shares make swimwear far more than a local curiosity: it is a major employer, an export business and a piece of industrial news that returns every season, in orders, trade fairs, design trends and the summer beach economy that displays the product where it is made.

For Huludao Television, swimwear is an ideal continuing story. It links the factory floor to the beach, local jobs to international markets, and a small coastal city to a national title. Coverage of the cluster — its companies, its workers and its annual rhythm — is economic reporting rooted in something viewers can see and wear, and it gives the station an industrial subject unlike the petrochemical plants that dominate the other end of the city's economy.

Xingcheng Ancient City and Yuan Chonghuan

Inland from Xingcheng's beaches stands Xingcheng Ancient City, one of China's best-preserved Ming-dynasty cities. Founded as the garrison city of Ningyuan, it retains its Ming walls, gates and street plan, with the bell and drum towers and Confucian temple that belonged to a frontier administrative and military centre. It is a walled city that was built to be defended, and its survival in such complete form is rare in China.

The city's fame is bound to Yuan Chonghuan, the Ming commander who held Ningyuan against Later Jin forces in the 1620s, in the wars that preceded the Qing conquest. Yuan's command post in the city is preserved among its historic sites, and his defence of Ningyuan remains one of the best-known episodes of the Ming–Qing transition. For viewers in Huludao, this is not distant textbook history: it happened at a city inside their own prefecture, whose walls they can walk.

That makes Xingcheng Ancient City a recurring cultural and tourism subject for the station — conservation of the walls, festivals and visits within the old streets, and the interpretation of the Ningyuan story for new generations. A municipal broadcaster that can move in a single programme strand from a swimwear factory to a Ming garrison city holds two very different Chinas in one prefecture.

Jiumenkou: the Great Wall on water

Huludao's other great heritage site is the Jiumenkou Great Wall, in Suizhong County. Jiumenkou is the only section of the Great Wall built on water: where the wall crosses the Jiujiang River, it does so on a bridge-like structure pierced by nine arches — the nine gates that give the place its name — so that the river flows through the fortification itself. The section was built in 1381, under the direction of the Ming founding general Xu Da, and stretches about 1,700 metres.

The site was inscribed as part of the Great Wall's UNESCO World Heritage listing, with its World Heritage recognition recorded in 2002 for this section. Its military history is as dramatic as its engineering. Near Jiumenkou in 1644, at the Battle of Yipianshi, forces in the collapsing Ming order and the advancing Qing fought in the campaign that followed Wu Sangui's opening of Shanhaiguan — one of the decisive passages in China's dynastic transition, fought on Huludao's ground.

For the station, Jiumenkou combines everything its tourism programming needs: a structure found nowhere else in the Great Wall system, a river landscape, and a documented place in a turning point of national history. Heritage coverage here is also practical news — protection of the fabric, visitor management and the local economy around the site.

Port, petrochemicals and the working coast

Against this heritage stands modern Huludao: a port city with petrochemical industry on the Liaodong Bay coast. Port operations, refining and chemical production, shipping and the services around them form the hard industrial core of the prefecture's economy, and therefore of the station's news agenda — investment and plant news, employment, safety and environmental reporting, and the condition of a coast where industry, fishing, beaches and housing share the same shoreline.

The juxtaposition defines Huludao. The same prefecture that exports swimsuits by the container and processes petrochemicals also guards a Ming garrison city and a wall in a river. Huludao Television's record states that balance plainly, naming the port and petrochemical city and its swimwear, ancient city and Great Wall in a single description — an editorial territory in which an industrial bulletin and a heritage feature are both, recognisably, Huludao stories.

Tourism, beaches and the summer season

Tourism programming in Huludao follows the coast. Xingcheng's bathing beaches draw summer visitors from across the northeast, the ancient city gives the trip a historical centre, and Jiumenkou and the wider Liaodong Bay shore extend it. The summer season is therefore news as well as leisure coverage: visitor numbers, beach safety, transport, prices and weather are livelihood information for the local businesses that depend on a short northern summer.

Offshore, the islands and bays of Liaodong Bay, the fishing ports and the seafood for which a Bohai coast is known complete a tourism offer that the station presents to its own residents as much as to outsiders — a reminder of what their prefecture holds, and a service to the guesthouses, restaurants and boat operators whose year is made in a few warm months.

Converged media for a scattered prefecture

Huludao's broadcaster works within the city's converged media centre, integrating television with radio and new media. That structure matters in a prefecture spread along a coast and across inland counties, where Xingcheng, Suizhong and the port districts each generate their own news. A converged newsroom can send one reporting effort out on the main channel, on radio and online together, rather than treating the prefecture's places as separate audiences.

It also suits the station's double subject matter. Industrial and port news travels fast and suits digital updating; heritage and tourism features gain from television's pictures. Convergence lets both be made by the same organisation, for the same Huludao audience, without losing the flagship channel's role as the prefecture's shared bulletin.

Why Huludao Television matters

Huludao Television matters because Huludao compresses an unusual range of China into one prefecture: a Liaodong Bay port and petrochemical city formerly called Jinxi; Xingcheng, holder of the China Swimwear City title since 2010 with a large share of the world's swimsuits; a Ming garrison city where Yuan Chonghuan commanded; and the only Great Wall section that stands on water, at Jiumenkou. The municipal station is where those Huludaos meet — in Mandarin news, livelihood and tourism programmes made for the whole coastal prefecture.