About Jiaxing Daily

Jiaxing Daily

Jiaxing Daily (嘉兴日报, Jiaxing Ribao) is the Chinese-language daily newspaper of Jiaxing, a prefecture-level city in northern Zhejiang province, China. Formally founded in January 1985, it is the official newspaper — the party paper — of the Jiaxing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and it is described in reference works as the city's only large comprehensive newspaper. It is edited and published by the Jiaxing Daily Press, headquartered at 99 Yingbin Avenue in Jiaxing, under the domestic unified publication number CN 33-0010. Its sister title is the Nanhu Evening News. Since February 2023 the paper has belonged to the Jiaxing News Media Center (Media Group), the converged institution that unites the city's newspapers, radio, television and new media, whose flagship mobile platform is the "Reading Jiaxing" news client.

Founding in 1985

Jiaxing Daily was formally launched in January 1985. Its creation belonged to the same mid-1980s movement that produced most of Zhejiang's prefecture-level party papers: Jiaxing had been re-established as a prefecture-level city in the administrative reforms of the early reform era, and a municipal party committee required an organ of its own to publish its decisions, report its work and address its citizens. Reference listings record the paper's founding date, its publisher, its headquarters address on Yingbin Avenue and its publication number CN 33-0010, placing it in the sequence of Zhejiang party dailies whose numbers begin with the provincial prefix 33. The paper has been published continuously since 1985 as Jiaxing's daily of record.

The party paper's role in Jiaxing

As the organ of the municipal party committee, Jiaxing Daily performs the classic functions of a Chinese city party newspaper. It publishes the committee's policies, documents and meeting reports; it carries the official announcements of the municipal government, the people's congress and the consultative conference; and it reports the city's economic and social development for a readership of officials, institutions and ordinary subscribers. Jiaxing government and provincial reporting routinely cites Jiaxing Daily as the city's authoritative print source — for example, Zhejiang's provincial English-language portal has carried development reporting credited to the paper — and the paper's interviews with county and district party leaders are a staple of its pages. In a media system in which each prefecture-level city maintains exactly one such party daily, Jiaxing Daily's position is structurally guaranteed, and its status as the city's only large comprehensive newspaper is a matter of reference record.

Nanhu Evening News and the Daily's newspaper family

The Daily does not publish alone. Its subordinate sister title is the Nanhu Evening News, an evening paper named for Jiaxing's South Lake — the Nanhu that gives the evening paper its name is the lake at the heart of the city's revolutionary memory. Evening papers in China traditionally serve the general urban reader with society news, services and lighter features in a more popular register than the morning party daily, and the pairing of a party daily with an evening sister under one press house is the standard structure of a Chinese municipal press group. Together the two titles covered the city's print readership across the day, with the Daily carrying the official record and the evening paper the city's street-level life, until the convergence reforms of the 2020s folded print, broadcast and digital publishing into a single centre.

Coverage: South Lake and revolutionary heritage

No Chinese city party paper writes about a more symbolically charged local landscape than Jiaxing's. In the summer of 1921 the founding congress of the Chinese Communist Party, driven from Shanghai, concluded its final session aboard a pleasure boat on Jiaxing's South Lake; the "Red Boat" preserved there is one of the most venerated sites in the party's history, and Jiaxing styles itself the place where the party's voyage began. Jiaxing Daily's coverage of South Lake commemorations, of the Red Boat spirit invoked in national political discourse, and of the city's red tourism and patriotic education is therefore a standing front-page theme rather than an occasional feature. The paper also chronicles the wider historical city — a national historical and cultural city of canals and Jiangnan water towns, the home region of figures such as the writer Mao Dun and the cartoonist Feng Zikai — as part of its cultural reporting.

Coverage: Yangtze Delta integration and the G60 corridor

Economically, Jiaxing sits between Shanghai and Hangzhou in the heart of the Yangtze River Delta, and the Daily's development reporting follows the city's integration into that region. Zhejiang provincial reporting sourced to Jiaxing Daily has described the city's active role in the Yangtze River Delta G60 Science and Innovation Corridor, which links nine delta cities from Shanghai's Songjiang district; the building of science towns and industrial parks such as the Swan Lake Future Scientific Town, opened in April 2020 in Xiuzhou district; the city's eight high-tech industrial parks at provincial level or above; and a series of talent platforms opened to draw researchers and entrepreneurs into Jiaxing. These are the characteristic subjects of the paper's economy pages: industrial upgrading, technology commercialisation and the competition among delta cities for investment and talent, reported from the standpoint of Jiaxing's municipal programme.

Coverage: common prosperity and city life

Jiaxing also figures in Zhejiang's provincial experiment as a demonstration zone for common prosperity, and the municipal authorities have set the city the goal of becoming a model city of common prosperity and a pioneer city of socialist modernisation — goals the founding documents of the city's new media centre explicitly say its publicity work exists to serve. Jiaxing Daily's pages accordingly mix development reporting with the civic coverage of a Jiangnan city of lakes and rivers: urban construction, public services, education, health, and the cultural life of its districts and counties, from Jiashan and Pinghu to Haining, Haiyan and Tongxiang. The paper's interview series with county-level party secretaries, excerpted in republication services, show it performing the party press's coordinating role across the prefecture's jurisdictions.

The 2023 convergence: Jiaxing News Media Center

On the morning of 13 February 2023, the founding ceremony of the News Media Center (Media Group) of Jiaxing was held, an event reported by the Jiaxing municipal government as the city's solid step in deepening municipal-level media integration, implementing the requirements of the twentieth national congress of the Communist Party on all-media communication systems. Chen Wei, secretary of the municipal party committee, and Zhao Lei, deputy director of the Zhejiang provincial party committee's publicity department, jointly unveiled the centre. The new institution fully integrates the city's major platforms — newspapers, radio, television stations and new media — and was charged with building the "Reading Jiaxing" news client into a powerful, diversified publicity platform serving the city. For Jiaxing Daily, the ceremony marked the end of its life as a stand-alone press house and its absorption, like its peers across China, into a converged municipal media group in which the printed daily is one product of a multimedia newsroom.

Digital presence

The paper's digital edition has been published through Jiaxing's online news portal under the Daily's own web address, and its content circulates through the municipal portal and provincial republication. In the converged structure, the centre's strategy is to make the "Reading Jiaxing" client the principal mobile gateway to the city's official news, carrying the Daily's reporting alongside broadcast and online output. The trajectory — print founding in 1985, web presence in the portal era, and app-centred convergence in 2023 — matches the sequence experienced by Chinese prefecture-level party papers nationally, with Jiaxing's integration completed in the first wave of Zhejiang's municipal media reforms.

Place in the Zhejiang party press

Jiaxing Daily is a representative institution of the Zhejiang party press: a mid-1980s foundation, four decades as its city's sole comprehensive daily and party organ, a sister evening paper named for the city's emblematic lake, and a 2023 passage into converged media. What distinguishes its profile is the city it serves. Because Jiaxing's South Lake occupies a foundational place in the ruling party's own history, the paper's commemorative and political coverage carries a resonance beyond the local, and its development reporting documents one of the Yangtze Delta's most closely watched integration stories. The newspaper remains Jiaxing's daily of record in print and the senior print brand of the Jiaxing News Media Center.