About Liaoyuan Television

Liaoyuan Television

Overview

Liaoyuan Television is the municipal television station of Liaoyuan in southern Jilin province, China, run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within the Liaoyuan converged media centre. Its main channel carries local news, livelihood and cultural programming in Mandarin for a small prefecture with a remarkable industrial story.

Liaoyuan rose on coal, suffered when the coal ran down, and reinvented itself as the largest cotton-sock production base in China. That transformation — from pits to hosiery machines — is the central narrative of the modern city, and Liaoyuan Television is its chronicler: a small-city broadcaster covering one of the most instructive industrial transitions in the northeast.

Source of the Liao

Liaoyuan stands on the upper Dongliao River, at the transition between the offshoots of the Changbai Mountains and the Songnen Plain. Its name means "source of the Liao", reflecting the Dongliao River's origin here. The prefecture is compact — the city administers the Longshan and Xi'an districts and the counties of Dongliao and Dongfeng — and sits on the routes between Changchun and Shenyang, two of the northeast's great cities.

The land was a Qing dynasty imperial hunting preserve, the Shengjing paddock, first opened to legal farming settlement in the late nineteenth century, and human activity here reaches back to the Bronze Age; the area is counted among the birthplaces of the Manchu people. Coal changed everything: discovered in 1911, it made the town then called Xi'an a mining centre. For its television station, the prefecture's scale is an asset — a community small enough for genuinely comprehensive local coverage.

From Xi'an coalfield to resource transition

Under Japanese occupation, Xi'an was a major coal-mining centre of Manchukuo, second only to Fushun; it was also the place of imprisonment of the American general Jonathan Wainwright, captured in the Philippines. In 1948 Xi'an was divided into city and county; the city was renamed Liaoyuan in 1952, the county became Dongliao in 1956, both came under Jilin in 1954, and Liaoyuan became a prefecture-level city in 1983. At its peak, the city's coal output accounted for a striking one twenty-ninth of the national total.

Coal dominated until the 1990s, when depletion brought decline; Liaoyuan was named among the State Council's pilot cities for the transformation of resource-based cities. The 2005 Central Hospital fire, which killed 39 people, was a further trauma that national reporting tied to the need for stronger safety regulation. The station's news archive covers this whole arc — and its current reporting is dominated by what replaced coal.

The sock capital

What replaced coal, above all, is socks. Liaoyuan today is China's largest cotton-sock production base: by recent official figures, some 40,000 sock machines in the city produce around 3.5 billion pairs a year — in popular telling, one in three Chinese people owns a pair of Liaoyuan socks. The Northeast Sock Textile Industrial Park anchors the industry, which has more than seventy years of local history and by the 1980s was already the largest hosiery base in the northeast. The trade pattern is proverbial: "South Zhuji, North Liaoyuan".

Alongside hosiery, the city has developed aluminium processing, metallurgy, building materials, agricultural processing, pharmaceuticals and new energy, and it holds another distinctive title as home to China's largest sika deer breeding base, with some 280,000 purebred deer. For Liaoyuan Television, economic programming has an upbeat core story — reinvention — that most resource cities cannot offer, and the sock industry's fairs, factories and brands are its staple subjects.

Channels and services

Liaoyuan Television's main channel is a general service in Mandarin carrying the prefecture's news bulletins along with livelihood, industrial and cultural programming. Through cable and terrestrial distribution it covers the city's two districts and two counties, and the converged media centre republishes its journalism on mobile and online platforms.

As the municipal tier of broadcasting, the station works beneath Jilin Television and CCTV, supplying the continuous local coverage — factory floors in the sock park, deer farms in Dongfeng, river-town life along the Dongliao — that neither provincial nor national media attempt. Its small scale makes its claim to comprehensiveness credible.

News and livelihood programming

The news agenda is headed by the transformation economy: hosiery production and trade, new-energy projects, investment and employment in the replacement industries, and the continuing management of the mining legacy, including the conversion of mining-subsidence land into parks and wetlands such as the Liaoyuan mining wetland park. Municipal services, education and health, and the practicalities of small-city life fill the livelihood strand.

Agriculture and the counties matter too: Dongliao and Dongfeng are farming and deer-breeding counties, and rural reporting — grain, animal husbandry, rural revitalisation — serves a substantial share of the prefecture's audience. Seasonal coverage follows both the industrial calendar of trade fairs and the agricultural year.

Industrial transition on screen

Few Chinese stations can document a complete industrial rebirth, and Liaoyuan Television's economic output makes the most of it: features on the sock park's workshops where rows of machines knit for national brands, on the international hosiery trade fairs the city hosts, on aluminium and equipment manufacturing, and on the ecological restoration of the coalfield. The narrative is factual as well as promotional — official accounts themselves describe a century of mining history and the deliberate diversification into textiles, new energy, tourism and sport.

The deer economy supplies visual riches: sika deer are raised for antler velvet and other products central to traditional medicine, and Dongfeng County's deer culture gives the station's rural programming a subject unlike any other prefecture's.

Pipa, deer and river culture

Liaoyuan styles itself the "Hometown of Chinese Pipa" as well as of socks and sika deer, and music — pipa performance and teaching — features in its cultural identity and in the station's arts coverage. Kuixing Tower in Longshan Park overlooks the Dongliao River winding through the city, and the riverside is a setting for the community cultural life the station records.

Industrial heritage is curated as culture: the city museum presents the arc from Neolithic settlement to coalfield to sock capital, mining-subsidence areas have become wetland parks and leisure spaces, and a traditional Chinese herbs museum reflects the deer-and-medicine economy. Cultural programming ties these threads into the story of a city that kept its past while changing its trade.

The converged media centre era

Liaoyuan Television operates within the converged media centre created under the national reform of local media, in which city and county radio, television and new-media resources are merged into a single organisation producing for all platforms from one newsroom. For a small prefecture, the economics are compelling: scarce journalistic resources serve broadcast and digital audiences together.

The model also fits Liaoyuan's promotional needs. A city selling socks to the whole country and courting tourism and investment benefits from a media centre whose short videos and livestreams can carry the sock park, the deer farms and the river scenery to national phone audiences — the station's own footage becoming the city's shop window.

Audience and community role

The station's audience is the prefecture's population of city workers, hosiery-industry employees, farmers and deer breeders — a community that has lived through a wrenching economic change within a generation. Local television's role in such a place is partly informational and partly cohesive: it explains the transition, reports its results honestly, and gives residents a shared picture of the city they are rebuilding.

Public-service functions — government notices, health and education information, weather and river conditions on the upper Dongliao — complete the remit. In a small prefecture, the station's reporters and viewers meet daily; that accountability is the foundation of local media trust.

Significance and outlook

Liaoyuan Television matters as the record of a successful escape from the resource curse. Many Chinese coal cities are still searching for their replacement industry; Liaoyuan found one in an unlikely product and became a national production centre. The station documents that achievement in daily detail — and its experience is a reference for every resource-city broadcaster in the northeast.

The outlook is encouraging by local-media standards: a growing, brandable local economy gives the converged centre both stories and commercial partners, while digital distribution lets a very small station reach the national market its city's factories already serve. Liaoyuan Television's task is to make the sock capital as well known on screen as it is in the shops.