About Market News

Market News

Market News (Chinese: 市场报; pinyin: Shichang Bao) was a Chinese-language economic newspaper published in Beijing by the People's Daily Press. Founded in 1979, at the start of the reform era, it was the People's Daily system's paper for the emerging commodity economy, covering markets, prices, consumer goods, commerce and business at a time when such reporting was new in China. For decades it served traders, enterprises and economic officials as a practical market-information daily. Its print edition was suspended in 2019, as the People's Daily Press restructured its portfolio of subsidiary newspapers.

Founded in 1979, the year markets returned

The newspaper's founding date is its biography in miniature. In 1979 China was emerging from the planned economy: the reform and opening-up turn had been announced at the end of 1978, markets for consumer goods were cautiously reappearing, and official newspapers were almost the only newspapers that existed. A title called Market News, created inside the People's Daily system in that year, announced a subject that had barely been reportable a few years earlier — the market itself. Where the flagship People's Daily spoke for the Party centre, its new subsidiary was assigned the commodity economy: the prices, goods and trading activity through which ordinary economic life was being rebuilt.

The People's Daily system's market paper

Within the People's Daily Press portfolio, Market News held the economic-practical brief. The Press published the Party's flagship daily and a family of subsidiary newspapers for particular fields and readerships, and subsidiaries lived a different life from the flagship: closer to their subject, more service-oriented, and more exposed to the market for readers and advertising that developed around them. Market News was the family's window on commerce. Its existence inside the most authoritative press institution in China also gave market information an official imprimatur at a time when trading was still ideologically sensitive — to print prices in a People's Daily paper was to declare that prices were legitimate news.

Markets, prices and consumer goods

The paper's coverage was defined by its founding brief: markets, prices, consumer goods, commerce and business. In the 1980s this was pioneering journalism. A planned economy administered prices; a reforming economy needed them reported — the price of grain, steel, bicycles and cloth, the state of wholesale markets, the supply of consumer goods to shops whose shelves had been thin for a generation. The paper reported the emerging commodity economy as practical information for the people who operated it: traders, enterprises and economic officials. Its pages documented, week by week, the re-creation of a commercial society.

A paper of the commercialisation era

The decades that followed transformed both China and its press, and the paper lived through the transformation it reported. After 1979 the government commercialised the press by creating newspapers designed to respond to the market; by the mid-1990s metropolitan and commercial titles were reaching circulations above a million, and party organ papers were losing readers — the People's Daily's own circulation fell from about 6.2 million in 1979 to about 2 million two decades later. Market News belonged to the commercialising tier of the official system: a subsidiary paper expected to find its readers in the marketplace whose doings it covered, in an era when the number of Chinese newspapers grew from 186 in 1978 to more than two thousand.

The voice of official market morality

As an organ of the People's Daily system, the paper also carried the system's editorial voice into economic life — including its campaigns. The China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong preserved a characteristic example: in April 2006, as an official campaign for a "civilised" internet gathered pace, an editorial in Market News discussed the need for self-censorship for a more civilised internet, praising the self-discipline pact under which websites had, in the editorial's words, shut down more than 200 undesirable discussion forums and deleted some 1.5 million harmful web postings. The episode shows the dual nature of the subsidiary official paper: a market-information daily that was also, when the centre required it, a loudspeaker for national campaigns in the commercial sphere.

Readers: traders, enterprises and officials

For decades the paper served traders, enterprises and economic officials as a practical market-information daily. Its readership was the working population of the commodity economy: the managers of state trading companies and supply-and-marketing cooperatives, the wholesalers and retailers of the new markets, the price and commerce officials who administered a system in transition, and later the private businesspeople who joined them. What such readers needed was not commentary on high policy but the state of the market — and that need, in the decades when China had few other sources of commercial information, was the paper's franchise.

The long restructuring of the subsidiary press

The paper's end came as part of a system-wide restructuring rather than any failure of its own. From the early 2000s, official policy repeatedly pruned the subsidiary press: a 2003 order abolished forced subscriptions that had propped up official publications, central decisions limited the newspapers that party and government bodies at each level could retain, and press groups were pressed to concentrate resources on their flagships and their digital operations. Print advertising migrated online, and subsidiary papers of press groups across China were merged, converted or closed in waves. The People's Daily Press, restructuring its own portfolio of subsidiary newspapers, suspended the print edition of Market News in 2019 — forty years after the paper had been founded to report the birth of the market economy.

Publication history and final years

The paper's forty-year print run, from 1979 to 2019, maps almost exactly onto the first four decades of reform and opening up. It began when market reporting itself was a novelty and a political statement; it flourished through the decades of commercialisation, when a market-information daily had a nation of new traders to serve; and it closed in the digital era, when market information had become instantaneous, free and infinite, and when the official press system was consolidating around flagship brands and their online platforms. Its suspension was announced in the context of that portfolio restructuring, not of scandal or sanction.

Legacy

Market News leaves a particular documentary legacy. Histories of the Chinese press treat the reform-era subsidiary papers as the mechanism by which commercial journalism re-entered China, and this paper was among the earliest and longest-lived of them: the People's Daily system's own market daily, founded in the first year of the market's return. Its four decades of price, commodity and commerce reporting are a running record of the economy it was named for — written, unusually, from inside the Party's own publishing house.

The pruning that eventually ended the paper's print life had been prepared for years. On 15 July 2003 an official order known as Document 19 attacked the economics of the official press by eliminating forced subscriptions — the practice under which work units were made to subscribe to official publications — and party leaders argued that pulling funding from nonessential publications would both relieve the burden on subscribers and invigorate the market. National statistics chart the world Document 19 intervened in: between 1978 and 2002 the number of Chinese newspapers rose from 186 to 2,137 and of magazines from 930 to 9,029, a proliferation that the consolidation policies of the following two decades steadily reversed, title by title, until the People's Daily Press's own restructuring reached Market News in 2019.