About Ji'an Television

Ji'an Television

Overview

Ji'an Television is the prefecture-level television station of Ji'an in central Jiangxi, operated by the city's radio and television broadcaster, now part of the Ji'an converged media centre. Jiangxi completed prefecture-level media-centre integration across all eleven of its prefecture-level cities in 2023, and Ji'an's centre is part of that province-wide structure. Its flagship channel carries local news and cultural programming in Mandarin. The station serves a prefecture of exceptional historical depth: the ancient land of Luling, on the Gan River, gateway to the Jinggang Mountains.

Ji'an's identity rests on a rare pairing. It is a cradle of Chinese scholarly culture, the homeland of Ouyang Xiu, Wen Tianxiang and Yang Wanli, praised for a thousand years as a land of literature and integrity. It is also a cradle of the Chinese revolution, for the Jinggang Mountains on its western border were the first rural revolutionary base of the Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1927. A station that must honour both the academy and the mountain stronghold has a cultural remit of unusual weight, and Ji'an Television's programming is built around it.

Luling: The Ancient Land on the Gan River

Ji'an stands in the middle reaches of the Gan River, Jiangxi's mother river, in a basin ringed by mountains on three sides and centred on the fertile Jitai Plain. In ancient times the region was called Luling and later Jizhou; the name Ji'an, drawn from words meaning Jitai people's peace, dates from the early Yuan dynasty. Ji'an is counted among the earliest ancient counties in Jiangxi and one of the birthplaces of Jiangxi culture, with the Gan River and its tributaries, the Suichuan, Shuishui, Heshui, Wujiang and Gujiang, tying its counties together since antiquity.

The prefecture today administers two districts, a county-level city and ten counties over some 25,300 square kilometres, with a population of about five million. For Ji'an Television this is a classic river-basin service area: a historic urban core at Jizhou, county towns up and down the Gan, and mountain counties reaching west to the Luoxiao range and the Jinggang massif. The station's news and cultural programmes move along the river as naturally as the prefecture's own trade and travel have always done.

Organisation and the Converged Media Centre

Ji'an Television operates within the Ji'an converged media centre, in a province that moved early and completely on media integration: by 2023 all eleven of Jiangxi's prefecture-level cities had completed prefecture-level media-centre integration. In the converged model, the city's television, radio and new-media operations share one newsroom, gathering stories once and publishing them across television and digital platforms. Ji'an's flagship television channel remains the centre's principal outlet for local news and cultural programming.

The structure suits a prefecture whose signature stories are spread across distance and season. A commemoration on Jinggangshan, a festival in an ancient Luling village and a harvest on the Jitai Plain can all be covered by the centre's reporters and shared instantly beyond the television audience. It also supports the deep cultural specialism Ji'an requires: Luling heritage and Jinggang history are not beats a small newsroom can improvise, and pooling resources helps the station sustain knowledgeable coverage of both.

Local News and the Life of the Prefecture

Local news anchors the schedule. Ji'an Television reports the municipal government, county administrations, infrastructure, education, health and public services across the prefecture, together with the economic development of a central-Jiangxi city working to build industry along the Gan River corridor. Coverage follows transport links, industrial parks, urban growth in Jizhou and the county towns, and the agricultural economy of the Jitai Plain, long celebrated as a granary of the region south of the Yangtze.

Livelihood programming addresses residents' everyday concerns: farm prices and support, employment, schooling, medical services and consumer information. Rural revitalisation is a standing theme in a prefecture of farming counties and mountain townships, and the station reports village development, returning migrants and the improvement of rural services. Through such programming the station performs the basic covenant of prefecture television: that a farmer in Suichuan and a teacher in Jizhou alike can turn to the same local channel for news that concerns them directly.

The Land of Literature and Integrity

Ji'an's proudest inheritance is scholarly. Known historically as a prefecture of articles and moral integrity, Luling produced an extraordinary procession of examination scholars, by local tradition some three thousand jinshi across the dynasties, and a constellation of famous names: Ouyang Xiu, leader of Northern Song prose and letters; Yang Wanli, one of the great poets of the Southern Song; Xie Jin of the early Ming; and above all Wen Tianxiang, the Southern Song chancellor and poet from Luling who refused to serve the conquering Yuan and was executed, leaving his Song of Righteousness as a national testament of loyalty.

The station's cultural programming is steeped in this inheritance. Bailuzhou Academy, founded on a river islet at Ji'an in the thirteenth century and still a symbol of the city's learning, the Wen Tianxiang memorial, the Jizhou kilns that fired celebrated black-glazed tea bowls in the Song dynasty, and the Luling Cultural Ecological Park along the Gan all furnish material for features and documentaries. Qingyuan Mountain, home to the Qingyuan lineage of Chan Buddhism, adds a religious dimension. In Ji'an, history is not decoration on the news; it is the prefecture's principal claim on the nation's attention, and its station treats it accordingly.

Jinggangshan: The Red Cradle

West of the city, in the Luoxiao Mountains on the Hunan border, rise the Jinggang Mountains, administered as part of Ji'an. In October 1927, after the Autumn Harvest Uprising, forces led by Mao Zedong established themselves at Jinggangshan, creating the first rural revolutionary base area of the Chinese Communist Party and a model of encircling the cities from the countryside. The mountain town of Ciping became the base's centre, and sites across the range, former residences, the revolutionary martyrs' cemetery and the Jinggangshan Revolution Museum, preserve that history. Ji'an is consequently honoured as a red cradle and holy land of the revolution.

Ji'an Television's history programming returns often to Jinggangshan: commemorations, red-tourism seasons, museum exhibitions and the mountain communities whose ancestors supported the base. The station also covers the practical side of red tourism, now a major industry for the mountain counties, with its hotels, guides and patriotic-education visitors. Presenting Jinggangshan well is both a duty and a local economic interest, and it gives the station a subject that draws national audiences to a prefecture channel.

Ancient Villages and Living Heritage

Between the scholarly city and the revolutionary mountains lies a countryside of ancient villages, and the station's cultural cameras explore it. Ji'an's counties preserve Ming and Qing villages of ancestral halls and old residences, among them Meibi ancient village and the carved and painted houses for which Luling folk architecture is known. Intangible heritage is richly documented in the prefecture, with items at national, provincial and city level spanning folk literature, traditional dance such as dragon and lantern dances, traditional skills and folk customs, a range that reflects the depth of village culture along the Gan.

Programming records these traditions in place: lantern festivals in county towns, craft techniques, village opera and the seasonal rituals of farming communities. Such features serve an archival purpose as rural Jiangxi changes, preserving on screen customs that modernisation is thinning. They also serve the prefecture's cultural tourism, presenting the Luling countryside to visitors who come for Jinggangshan and stay for the villages. For village audiences themselves, seeing their own festivals on the prefecture channel is a recognition that their heritage counts in the city's account of itself.

Agriculture, Industry and the Gan River Economy

The station's economic reporting balances the plain and the mountains. On the Jitai Plain and along the Gan, agriculture remains fundamental: rice, rapeseed, citrus and other products of a historic granary region, together with the river transport and processing industries they support. Programmes follow harvests, prices, water conservancy on the Gan and its tributaries, and the flood precautions that a river prefecture must take in the rainy season.

In the city and county towns, coverage tracks Ji'an's industrial development, its efforts to attract manufacturing along the river corridor and to connect its products to the markets of the Yangtze delta and the coast. Tourism forms the third strand, linking Jinggangshan, the ancient villages and the Luling heritage sites into a prefecture-wide visitor economy. The station presents these sectors as one story: a historic agricultural land using its culture and its revolutionary fame to build a broader prosperity, while the Gan River, its ancient highway, continues to bind the prefecture together.

Ji'an Television Today

Today Ji'an Television broadcasts from the Ji'an converged media centre, part of Jiangxi's completed province-wide system of prefecture media centres, with its flagship channel carrying local news and cultural programming in Mandarin across the prefecture. Its subjects are Ji'an's own: the Gan River and the Jitai Plain, Bailuzhou Academy and the memory of Wen Tianxiang, the Jizhou kilns, the ancient villages of Luling, and the forested ridges of Jinggangshan where the rural revolution began.

Few prefecture stations must hold together two such powerful inheritances, the scholar's brush and the revolutionary's flag. Ji'an Television does so by treating both as local history, made by people of these counties and remembered by their descendants, while also performing the daily work of news, livelihood information and public service for five million residents. In that combination of reverence and routine, it fulfils the essential purpose of city television in China.