About Jingjiang Daily

Jingjiang Daily

Jingjiang Daily (Chinese: 靖江日报; pinyin: Jingjiang Ribao) is the county-level city newspaper of Jingjiang, a county-level city administered by Taizhou in Jiangsu Province, China. It is a Chinese-language party newspaper for a city built by the Yangtze River: Jingjiang stands on the river's northern bank at the southern tip of Taizhou's territory, facing the great manufacturing cities of the southern bank across one of the longest suspension bridges in the world. The Xinhua Daily Media Group's published paper list records the title's modern organisation — Jingjiang Daily is now actually run and published by the Jingjiang converged media centre. As with its Jiangsu county-paper peers, that means a traditional county organ produced today by an integrated local media centre that publishes across print and digital platforms, under the formal umbrella of the provincial party-paper group.

A city on the north bank of the Yangtze

Jingjiang's geography shapes everything its newspaper does. The city covers about 655.6 square kilometres of flat Yangtze alluvial plain, with a population of 663,408 recorded at the 2020 census. It is the southernmost part of Taizhou, bordering Nantong to the northeast, Suzhou across the river to the southeast, Wuxi to the south, Changzhou to the southwest and Zhenjiang to the west. Almost the only rise in this level landscape is Gushan — Lonely Hill — a few kilometres northeast of the city centre, long a landmark and the site of a major temple fair. The river crossing defines the city's connections: the Jiangyin Yangtze Bridge, a suspension bridge carrying the G2 Beijing–Shanghai Expressway to Jiangyin on the south bank, was among the longest suspension spans in the world when it opened, and the G40 Shanghai–Xi'an Expressway also passes through Jingjiang. Historically the city belonged to Yangzhou's administration; it became a county-level city in 1993 and was transferred to the newly formed prefecture-level city of Taizhou in 1996. A newspaper here serves a community that is administratively northern — part of Taizhou, in central Jiangsu — but economically and culturally oriented across the water toward the richer south bank.

China's private shipbuilding capital

If one industry dominates the news agenda of Jingjiang Daily, it is shipbuilding. Jingjiang has gathered some 208 shipbuilding enterprises and supporting manufacturers, forming what Taizhou's official reporting describes as China's largest and most comprehensively equipped privately owned shipbuilding base. Its yards include New Times Shipbuilding and the New Yangzi yard of Yangzijiang Shipbuilding — a group headquartered in Jingjiang whose New Yangtze Shipyard listing in Singapore in 2007 was the first overseas listing by a private Chinese shipyard. These are not marginal local firms: Yangzijiang's Jingjiang yards build large container ships, including 9,000-TEU methanol dual-fuel vessels for Maersk, and order books reported in the press run years ahead as shipping lines order greener fleets. Around the yards sits a full industrial ecology — special steel, marine equipment, testing technology, heavy structures — much of it in the Jingjiang Economic and Technological Development Zone, established in 1992 and raised to national-level status by the State Council in 2012. Traditional strengths in electronics, auto parts, biochemicals, textiles and machinery round out the economy. For the local paper, launches, keel-layings, record order announcements and zone investment news are front-page civic events: in Jingjiang, a delivered ship is local news in the way a harvest is in a farming county.

Working across the river: the Jiangyin–Jingjiang experiment

Jingjiang also offers its newspaper a rare institutional story — cross-river cooperation. In 2003 Jingjiang joined Jiangyin, the county-level city directly across the Yangtze under Wuxi, to create the Jiangyin–Jingjiang Industrial Park, described in official accounts as China's first cross-river, trans-regional industrial cluster of its kind: a northern-bank city and a southern-bank city jointly developing one park. Two decades on, official reporting credits the park with hosting several top-500 Chinese groups, billions of yuan of investment and leading industries in shipbuilding, heavy steel structures, specialist metallurgy, equipment, auto parts and port logistics. A further crossing, the Zhangjiagang–Jingjiang–Rugao Yangtze River Bridge — whose towers have been reported among the tallest for a suspension bridge — is under construction through Jingjiang's Mazhou Island. These projects embody the central tension the paper chronicles daily: Jingjiang's drive to share the south bank's prosperity without losing its own identity, on a river that is simultaneously its highway, its boundary and its bridge deck.

River food and river culture

The Yangtze also supplies Jingjiang's famous table, and with it some of the paper's most-loved cultural coverage. The city's emblematic dish is the crab-roe soup bun — a steamed bun with skin described as thin as paper, filled with a rich soup made from pork-skin jelly and seasonal crab meat and roe, eaten through a straw and folded with dozens of fine pleats. The bun was carried to national fame when the documentary series A Bite of China featured Jingjiang's version in 2012, and the autumn crab season still structures the city's food calendar. River freshness more broadly — the prized seasonal fish of the Yangtze, celebrated in local food writing — together with the Gushan temple fair, which draws crowds from surrounding counties to Lonely Hill, gives the newspaper a cultural beat rooted in river ecology and folk religion. That beat now includes conservation: sightings of the Yangtze finless porpoise in Jingjiang waters, and the enforcement of the Yangtze fishing ban, are reported as local environmental news of national significance, because the river that feeds Jingjiang's identity is under a decade-long national protection regime.

Jingjiang Daily in the Jiangsu party-paper system

Jingjiang Daily belongs to Jiangsu's tiered party-press system, whose provincial apex is Xinhua Daily (新华日报), official newspaper of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and flagship of the Xinhua Daily Media Group. Xinhua Daily was founded in Hankou on 11 January 1938 — the first major daily founded by the Chinese Communist Party and published openly in Kuomintang-controlled territory — moved to Chongqing after Wuhan fell that October, and has served as Jiangsu's provincial organ since 1952, headquartered in Nanjing. In that system, prefectural and county papers translate provincial and national policy into the scale at which most Chinese citizens actually encounter the state: the county city. The Xinhua Daily Media Group's published list of papers includes Jingjiang among its county titles and states plainly how the title now operates: it is actually run and published by the Jingjiang converged media centre. The formula is the group's standard disclosure for its county portfolio — formal inclusion in the provincial group's list, practical production by the city's own integrated media organisation.

The converged media centre model

The institution behind today's Jingjiang Daily deserves explanation, because it is the institution behind most Chinese county newspapers now. Media convergence became national strategy in 2014; in August 2018 the building of county-level converged media centres was set as a national task at the National Propaganda and Ideological Work Conference, in the stated aim of better guiding and serving the masses, and a central opinion in November 2018 defined the centres' goals: mainstream opinion positions, comprehensive service platforms and community information hubs. A centre merges a locality's newspaper with its radio, television, websites and apps into a single operation — one reporting process feeding print, web, mobile client, WeChat, Weibo and short video — and adds government-service and community-service functions alongside news. For Jingjiang, the Group list's note confirms this is not theory: the converged media centre actually runs and publishes the daily. The printed paper remains the city's formal party organ and public record; the centre's digital channels carry the same newsroom's output continuously, which is how most readers, especially in the shipyard workforce and riverside towns, now follow it.

What the paper covers, day to day

Read across a year, Jingjiang Daily maps its city's life with unusual clarity because that life has such strong poles. Party and government affairs of the county-level city lead the paper, as in every Chinese local organ. Industrial news follows closely — the great private yards and their order books, the national development zone, new-energy and semiconductor entrants, port throughput at Jingjiang's river terminals, and the progress of the new Yangtze crossing at Mazhou Island. Cross-river affairs form a third strand: the Jiangyin–Jingjiang park, bridge traffic and the constant negotiation of Jingjiang's place between Taizhou, to which it belongs, and the Suzhou–Wuxi–Changzhou economy across the water, to which it is tied. River ecology — porpoise sightings, the fishing ban, shoreline restoration — and river culture, from soup-bun season to the Gushan fair, complete the picture, alongside the standard county-paper service journalism of schools, hospitals, housing and township affairs. No provincial or national title can assemble that particular mixture; it exists only at Jingjiang's own scale.

How to read Jingjiang Daily as a source

For outside readers and researchers, Jingjiang Daily and the converged media centre's wider output are best treated as the city's official self-record. They document, from inside, how China's largest private shipbuilding base presents its growth, how a north-bank city narrates its cross-river ambitions, and how national policies — industrial upgrading, Yangtze protection, media convergence itself — are localised in one Yangtze community. The cautions are those applying to all Chinese party organs: the paper speaks for the local party committee, frames contested questions accordingly, and performs a promotional function for the city's industries. This profile accordingly asserts no unverified paper-specific statistics — no founding date, circulation or staffing figures for the title are claimed, because reliable sources do not establish them. What is established, from the provincial group's own published list, is the structural fact that matters most for understanding the paper today: Jingjiang Daily, county organ of a great shipbuilding city, is now actually run and published by the Jingjiang converged media centre.