About Lianyi Bao

Lianyi Bao

Lianyi Bao (Chinese: 联谊报; pinyin: Lianyi Bao, literally 'Friendship News') is the newspaper associated with the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, published in Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province in eastern China. Its position in the record is distinctive: in the Zhejiang newspaper association's history of the province's press, it is catalogued as the first of the specialist-paper chapters — the opening example of the tier of Zhejiang newspapers that serve a single institution and a single field of public life rather than a general readership. That field is political consultation itself: the work of the CPPCC, the proposals of its members, and the united-front relationships that bring the Communist Party of China together with the democratic parties, people's organisations, ethnic minorities and representatives of every sector of society. To understand this small, specialised newspaper, a reader first has to understand the institution behind it.

A name that means friendship — and a united front

The title rewards a moment's attention. Lianyi in Chinese denotes friendship, fellowship and the deliberate cultivation of ties between people and groups; it is the vocabulary of banquets, alumni associations and friendship societies, not of government gazettes. For a CPPCC newspaper the choice is precise rather than decorative. The CPPCC describes itself as an organisation of the patriotic united front of the Chinese people, and unity is one of its two great stated themes, alongside democracy. A paper called 'Friendship News' announces, in its very name, that its subject is connection: between the ruling party and the eight democratic parties, between political advisers and the officials they advise, between Zhejiang at home and the overseas Chinese and friends abroad whom the united front also embraces. Where a party organ's name proclaims authority and a metropolitan paper's name proclaims a city, this title proclaims a relationship — and that relationship is the paper's whole reason to exist.

The institution behind the paper: the CPPCC explained

The Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference is a political advisory body and a central part of the Communist Party's united-front system. Its own official account defines it in three ways at once: an organisation in the patriotic united front of the Chinese people, an important organ for multiparty cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and an important means of promoting socialist democracy in China's political life. It is neither a body of state power nor a policymaking organ. Its members — drawn from the Communist Party and the non-Communist democratic parties, from personages without party affiliation, people's organisations, ethnic minorities and all social strata — serve as advisers to government and to legislative and judicial organs, putting forward proposals on major political and social issues. The structure is tiered. Below the National Committee in Beijing stand regional committees at provincial, prefectural and county level, guided rather than directly led by the level above, and each holding an annual plenary session — the provincial session typically coinciding with the provincial people's congress in the yearly rhythm known nationally as the Two Sessions. Lianyi Bao is the newspaper of the Zhejiang tier of that structure.

The three functions the paper reports on

The CPPCC's work, and therefore the paper's core news agenda, is conventionally summarised in three functions. The first is political consultation: discussion of major principles and policies proposed by central and local governments, and of important political, economic, cultural and social questions, ideally before decisions are made or while they are being implemented. The second is democratic oversight, officially called democratic supervision: offering suggestions and criticism on the implementation of the Constitution, laws, regulations and major policies, and on the work of government agencies and their staff. The third is participation in the discussion and handling of state affairs: organising members from all parties, organisations and sectors to take part in the country's political, economic, cultural and social life — through inspections, surveys, study tours and the drafting of formal proposals. For a newspaper, those three functions translate into a recognisable news mix: consultation meetings and their communiqués, members' proposals and the official replies they receive, inspection visits to factories, schools, hospitals and villages, and the follow-up question that gives CPPCC journalism its point — whether a proposal changed anything.

Zhejiang: the province whose consultation it covers

The Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the CPPCC operates in one of China's most consequential provinces. Zhejiang is a coastal East China province of about 64.6 million people, with its capital at Hangzhou and major cities including Ningbo, Wenzhou and Yiwu. Its economy — built on private enterprise, manufacturing clusters and trade, and transformed by the digital economy centred on Hangzhou firms such as Alibaba, founded there in 1999 — ranks among China's largest provincial economies, with output passing nine trillion yuan in 2024. In 2021 the province was designated a national demonstration zone for common prosperity, a policy experiment that put questions of income gaps, rural development and public services at the centre of provincial debate. Those are quintessentially CPPCC questions: consultative politics thrives on exactly the issues — education, health care, elder care, small-business conditions, urban-rural balance — where technical policy meets lived experience and where members drawn from business, academia, medicine, culture and the professions can speak with first-hand authority. A Zhejiang CPPCC newspaper thus covers consultation in a province whose experiment is watched by the whole country.

First among Zhejiang's specialist papers

The paper's bibliographic distinction deserves emphasis. Zhejiang's press, as organised in the provincial newspaper association's history, comprises the flagship party organ Zhejiang Daily, founded in 1949; a set of city and metropolitan papers; a strong tier of county-level papers; and a tier of specialist papers attached to particular systems — legal affairs, workers and trade unions, science and technology, youth, and political consultation among them. That Lianyi Bao opens the specialist-paper section of that history says something about how the province's own press historians rank the category: the CPPCC paper is treated as the archetype of the specialist form, the title against which the others are shelved. Specialist papers in China are easy for outsiders to overlook because they rarely compete for street sales or advertising attention; their readers are, in the first instance, the members and institutions of their own system. But their archival value is high. A complete run of a CPPCC newspaper is, in effect, the printed diary of a province's consultative politics, preserving who proposed what, when, and with what official response.

Who writes, who reads, and what gets published

The natural contributors to a CPPCC newspaper are the members themselves. Provincial CPPCC members are selected to represent sectors — the democratic parties, science and technology, economics, agriculture, education, medicine, culture and the arts, religion, ethnic minorities, returned overseas Chinese and other circles — and their working output consists of proposals, speeches at plenary and standing-committee sessions, inspection reports and reflected public opinion, the channel officially known as reporting social conditions and popular sentiment. A paper like Lianyi Bao turns that output into journalism: proposal stories that explain a problem through the member who investigated it, interviews with advisers who are also leading surgeons, engineers, teachers or entrepreneurs, reports of consultation forums where members and department officials sit at the same table, and coverage of the committee's own party-group and standing-committee work. Its readership is correspondingly layered — members and CPPCC staff first, then party and government departments that must answer proposals, then the democratic parties, federations and community organisations that make up the united front, and finally any citizen who wants to follow how advice moves, or fails to move, through Zhejiang's system.

Hangzhou and the annual rhythm of the Two Sessions

Published in Hangzhou, the paper follows the calendar of Zhejiang's political year. Its peak season is the provincial Two Sessions period, when the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the CPPCC holds its annual plenary session alongside the Provincial People's Congress in the capital. In those days the paper's subject fills the province's news agenda: members arrive bringing a year's proposals, group discussions take up the government work report, and consultation addresses everything from common-prosperity demonstration projects to digital-economy regulation and rural revitalisation. Between sessions, the rhythm slows but does not stop. Standing-committee meetings, special consultation conferences on a single theme, members' inspections in cities such as Ningbo, Wenzhou, Jiaxing and Jinhua, and the tracking of proposal handling all generate the steady, procedural news that is the paper's staple. Hangzhou itself — a city of West Lake heritage and internet-era wealth, host of the 2016 G20 summit — supplies the paper with both a dateline and a standing case study in the questions Zhejiang's advisers debate.

The converged-media era for an institutional paper

Even the most institutional of Chinese newspapers now works inside the converged-media transformation. Since the August 2014 national guiding opinion on promoting the convergent development of traditional and emerging media, established titles have been pressed to publish across print, web, mobile and social platforms, and CPPCC systems across China have built apps, WeChat accounts and video formats that let members submit proposals, follow their handling and join consultations online. For a friendship-and-consultation paper, digital tools fit the mission unusually well: consultation is a conversation, and a conversation can be widened by technology — members in different cities joining a consultation by video, citizens' opinions gathered through a committee's online channels and reflected upward, proposal texts published in full rather than summarised. The print edition retains its distinct role as the formal, archivable record of the Zhejiang committee's work. This profile makes no claim about the specific platforms or products of this individual title, which are not reliably documented in open sources; the point is the national framework within which every such paper now operates.

How to read Lianyi Bao as a source

For researchers, Lianyi Bao is a specialised but revealing source. It documents Zhejiang's consultative politics from inside the institution: the themes the provincial CPPCC chooses to consult on, the sectors whose voices are amplified, the proposals that win official replies and commendation, and the language in which unity and consensus are publicly performed. Read alongside Zhejiang Daily, it shows the difference between the party organ's authoritative announcement of policy and the advisory system's discussion around policy — earlier, broader and sometimes more concrete about problems on the ground. Two cautions apply. First, the paper speaks for and about the united front in the united front's own terms; its harmony is editorial policy as well as subject matter, and sharp conflict within consultation is unlikely to be visible in its pages. Second, paper-specific facts about titles at this level — founding dates, publication frequency, circulation and staffing — circulate on the open web without reliable sourcing, and this profile asserts none of them. What is firmly documented is enough: a Hangzhou-published newspaper of the Zhejiang Provincial Committee of the CPPCC, named for friendship, and placed by the province's own press history at the head of its specialist papers.