About Modern Express

Modern Express

Modern Express, known in Chinese as Xiandai Kuaibao and now styled in Chinese as Modern Express Plus, is a Chinese-language metropolitan daily newspaper published in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. It was launched under its present name on 12 October 1999, and its twenty-fifth anniversary in October 2024 was marked with a three-day readers' festival in Nanjing's historic Laomendong district. Reference listings give its domestic publication number as CN 32-0104, its cover price as one yuan, its format as a tabloid, and its headquarters as Zhidi Plaza at 55 Hongwu North Road in Nanjing. Its websites have been listed as kuaibao.net and xdkb.net, with an electronic edition of the printed paper online. The newspaper is published by Jiangsu Modern Express Media Company. Founded as a Xinhua News Agency paper, it is today sponsored by Phoenix Publishing and Media Group, one of Jiangsu's largest state-owned cultural companies, and it circulates mainly in Nanjing and southern Jiangsu, across Jiangsu province, and into neighbouring parts of Anhui.

From Deal Post to Modern Economic Post

The newspaper's lineage begins in April 1993 with a small economics paper called Maimaibao, rendered in English as Deal Post, sponsored by the Jiangsu branch of Xinhua News Agency. In August 1994 it was renamed Xiandai Jingji Bao, Modern Economic Post, acquiring the word modern that its successor still carries. These predecessor titles belonged to the first wave of commercially inflected newspapers created by Chinese state media organisations in the early 1990s, when news agencies and party papers were permitted to run market-oriented subsidiary titles aimed at the new business readership of the reform era. A trade paper sponsored by a Xinhua branch office was an unlikely seed for a mass-circulation city daily, but the structure was typical of the period: the licence, staff and institutional protection came from the state agency, while the content chased readers and advertising in the open market.

The 1999 Relaunch and the Ten-Cent Newspaper

After approval from the National Press and Publication Administration, Modern Economic Post was renamed Modern Express and redesigned on 12 October 1999. The relaunch repeated the most famous tactic of the Chinese metropolitan newspaper wars: a promotional retail price of one jiao, ten cents of a yuan. The paper's reference histories record that circulation passed 100,000 copies within a month of the new launch, and then grew by about ten thousand copies a day. The one-jiao strategy worked because a metropolitan daily of that era earned its money chiefly from advertising rather than from the cover price, and because Nanjing, as a provincial capital with several competing city papers, rewarded whichever title could put itself into the most hands fastest. The date of the relaunch, 12 October, has remained the paper's birthday: the nineteenth anniversary in 2018 and the twenty-fifth in 2024 were both celebrated on or around it, and the paper itself counts its founding from 1999, not from the 1993 predecessor.

A Xinhua Institution, Then a Phoenix Paper

Ownership of the newspaper has passed through three phases. In 2001 Modern Express was converted into an institution directly under Xinhua News Agency, a status that gave a Nanjing city paper the unusual backing of the national state news agency. In 2003 it expanded beyond the Nanjing market to cover the whole of Jiangsu, and in 2009 its press was restructured as an enterprise directly under Xinhua. The third phase began on 27 November 2015, when, with the approval of the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television, the paper's supervision was transferred to the Propaganda Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee and its sponsorship to Phoenix Publishing and Media Group, the Jiangsu provincial publishing conglomerate. The transfer brought a commercially successful metropolitan daily under the same provincial cultural group as Jiangsu's main book publishing operations, an example of the consolidation of provincial state media assets that marked Chinese press policy in the 2010s. Its listed president in reference sources of the period was Zhou Bin, and its editor-in-chief was named as Zhao Lei; at the twenty-fifth anniversary events in 2024, Zheng Chunping appeared as editor-in-chief.

Editorial Identity and Sections

The newspaper's stated motto is to speak the truth, do practical things and foster healthy trends, and its stated principle is to stay close to the public and close to everyday life, combining news with service information. In its thick print era, a daily edition carried the news pages plus special sections on property, securities, education, health, tourism, jobs, food, computers, fashion and motoring, serving the consumption interests of an urban middle-class readership. It also produced local news editions for different parts of its distribution area, each under its own name: the Nanjing local edition was simply called Nanjing, while the Wuxi edition was called Life Wuxi, for example. At its peak the paper set a record of 168 pages in a single day. Page counts have since fallen sharply, for the reasons its own history gives: the development of new media and the rising cost of newsprint. The print paper now averages about sixteen pages a day, a fraction of its thickest years, with its journalism spread across print, app, video and social channels instead.

Circulation: A World Top-100 Daily

Modern Express was, at its height, one of the largest newspapers in the world by circulation. Its reference history records that daily circulation passed one million copies in 2004. In the World Association of Newspapers' 2006 list of the world's one hundred largest daily newspapers by circulation, the paper ranked eightieth, with a circulation of 751,000 copies. Those figures date from the peak of Chinese metropolitan print, when Nanjing and Jiangsu titles competed in a province wealthy enough to sustain several mass papers, and they explain why the relaunched paper's editors were willing to sell copies for one jiao in 1999: at several hundred thousand copies, advertising rates, not cover revenue, decided survival. No comparably verified current print circulation is published, and in line with the rest of the Chinese industry the paper's audience is now measured mainly in digital reach, which the paper has put at more than fifteen million user contacts a day across its platforms.

Distribution Across Jiangsu and into Anhui

The newspaper is distributed mainly within Jiangsu province, with its centre of gravity in Nanjing and the richer southern Jiangsu cities along the Yangtze, and it is printed simultaneously in Jiangsu's prefecture-level cities so that copies reach provincial readers on the morning of publication. Its circulation also extends across the provincial border into Anhui, covering Hefei, the Anhui provincial capital, and the Yangtze cities of Ma'anshan, Wuhu and Bengbu, together with Huangshan and Chuzhou. That cross-border footprint follows the economy of the Nanjing metropolitan region, whose commuter and commercial ties reach deep into eastern Anhui, and it gave the paper a two-province market unusual for a city metropolitan title. The local-edition model, with named supplements for Nanjing, Wuxi and other cities, was built to hold those distinct markets inside one masthead.

New Media: ZAKER Nanjing, Pear Video and the Livestream Newsroom

The paper entered internet and mobile publishing in 2011 and, from 2013, built clusters of outdoor large screens and indoor electronic displays. On 16 June 2016 it announced a transformation and upgrading strategy and launched ZAKER Nanjing, a local channel on the ZAKER news app, as its mobile flagship. In 2018 it entered a strategic partnership with Pear Video, the short-video platform. Its daily reporting moved toward livestreaming and short, light video, including rapid livestreams assembled for breaking news. The paper's own history highlights products such as its July 2016 report on a border guard of fifty-two years in an uninhabited area, its August 2017 Saihanba ecological civilisation series, and its light-video and digital comic treatments of Huang Dafa, the Guizhou village official who led the building of a mountain water channel. Its new media work has won national journalism honours including the China News Award, and the paper says individual converged-media products have been spread more than one hundred million times online.

The Question Heard Around the World in 2018

The paper's most globally noticed moment came during the National People's Congress session of March 2018. At a press conference, Foreign Minister Wang Yi answered a question from a Modern Express reporter about the behaviour of so-called jingri elements, people who glorify historical Japanese militarism, by saying that such people were, in his words, the scum of the Chinese nation. The remark, prompted by the Nanjing paper's question, was widely reported inside and outside China. The choice of subject was not accidental for a newspaper published in Nanjing, the city whose wartime suffering at Japanese hands in 1937 remains central to Chinese national memory, and the paper's own anniversary histories list the exchange among the signature moments of its reporting. It demonstrated the reach a provincial metropolitan paper could still achieve in the national agenda through the annual parliamentary sessions, where its reporters were accredited alongside central media.

Renamed Modern Express Plus in 2018

On 12 October 2018, the nineteenth anniversary of the relaunch, the newspaper published the slogan Together with a plus, better on its front page and renamed itself, in Chinese, Modern Express Plus. In Chinese the added character is the plus sign itself, a branding device linking the print title to its app-centred strategy and to the formula its twenty-fifth anniversary coverage would later summarise as modern plus app. In English the paper continues to be known simply as Modern Express, the name under which it appears in Nanjing's newspaper listings and in its catalogue record for this directory. The change captured the paper's situation precisely: the printed Xiandai Kuaibao of 1999 remained the core brand, but the product readers increasingly used was the combination of paper, app, screens and video built around it.

The Twenty-Fifth Anniversary in Laomendong, 2024

The twenty-fifth anniversary readers' festival was held from 18 to 20 October 2024 in Laomendong, the restored historic district by Nanjing's Ming dynasty city wall. Contemporary coverage of the launch event described a reproduction of the paper's front page fifteen metres high and eight metres wide set against the wall, with the tower of the Great Bao'en Temple in the same view, an image the paper used to frame its theme, To the Times, Respect for the Future. The Olympic fencing champion Xu Anqi opened the event and fenced, in play, with a child reporter of the paper; a theme film of more than six minutes reviewed the paper's twenty-five years; and a birthday cake was modelled on the front page of the paper's 9,999th issue, a pure gold news edition, cut on stage by guests including officials from the Jiangsu provincial and Nanjing municipal publicity departments, publishing and film group executives, and reader representatives, who together launched the readers' festival. Three days of reader service activities followed. The staging, a newspaper's front page enlarged to the scale of a city wall in the old city, was a deliberate statement that the masthead remained part of Nanjing's civic landscape after a quarter of a century.

Place in Chinese Journalism

Modern Express is one of the clearest case studies of the Chinese metropolitan newspaper cycle. It began as a Xinhua branch trade paper in 1993, took the name Modern Economic Post in 1994, and was reborn on 12 October 1999 as a one-jiao city daily whose circulation climbed past 100,000 in a month and past one million copies a day in 2004, ranking eightieth in the world in 2006. It expanded across Jiangsu in 2003, passed from Xinhua's direct control to Phoenix Publishing and Media Group in 2015, added a plus to its Chinese name in 2018 to mark its app strategy, and celebrated twenty-five years in 2024 with its front page raised against the Ming city wall. Published from Hongwu North Road in Nanjing, in tabloid format at one yuan, it remains a daily newspaper in print at about sixteen pages, and a much larger converged news operation in video, livestream and mobile form.