About Nanning Evening News

Nanning Evening News

Nanning Evening News (Chinese: 南宁晚报; pinyin: Nanning Wanbao) is a Chinese-language evening newspaper published in Nanning, Guangxi, by the Nanning Daily Newspaper Group, the municipal group built around the Chinese Communist Party Nanning committee's Nanning Daily. It is the capital region's main evening title, covering city news, livelihood, consumer and community stories, culture and sport for readers in Nanning, Guangxi's political and commercial centre and China's gateway city for ASEAN trade. Alongside the party daily, it forms the print core of Nanning's municipal media as the group develops digital and converged outlets.

Origins: the Nanning People's News, 1956

The paper traces its founding to 1956, and reference histories describe it as the earliest evening newspaper published in Guangxi after the founding of the People's Republic. Its predecessor was the Nanning People's News (南宁人民报), founded on 15 September 1956. That paper was an early experiment in giving the Guangxi capital a popular city paper in the first decade of the new state; the Nanning Evening News counts its own history from this origin, and in 1996 the paper's fortieth anniversary was marked by a published collection of essays on its history, issued by the Guangxi Nationalities Publishing House — evidence of the institutional weight the title had accumulated by the reform era's midpoint.

Becoming the evening paper, 1958–1961

The title passed through the rapid reorganisations typical of the 1950s Chinese press. On 1 February 1958 the Nanning People's News ceased publication to make way for preparations for a full party daily, and on 1 March 1958 the Nanning Daily appeared as the organ of the Nanning municipal party committee. Three years later, on 1 March 1961, the Nanning Daily was converted into the Nanning Evening News — the change that gave the paper its lasting name and evening identity. In this period the paper was distributed throughout the cities and counties of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with subscribers in cities outside Guangxi as well: even as a municipal title it functioned, in a region whose press was still thin, as a paper for the whole of Guangxi.

The Cultural Revolution years

The paper's history in the late 1960s reflects the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution in the regional press. It served for a time as the organ of the Nanning municipal party committee before that system collapsed; on 14 April 1968 it resumed publication as the organ of the newly established Nanning Revolutionary Committee, the body that had replaced the city's party and government organs. The Nanning Daily title, revived in the same reshuffling, ceased again on 11 September 1968. Like most Chinese newspapers, the evening paper's existence in these years was intermittent and wholly bound to the political structures of the moment, and its run was subsequently caught up in the judgements of the period that followed.

Rehabilitation and the 1980 revival

In November 1979 the Nanning municipal party committee formally rehabilitated the Nanning Evening News — reversing the verdicts under which it had been treated in the Cultural Revolution period — and restored it as the organ newspaper of the municipal committee. It resumed publication on 1 May 1980 as a four-page quarto paper. The revival placed it among the wave of evening papers founded or restored across China at the beginning of the reform era, when the evening format became the principal vehicle for a more reader-oriented, life-focused journalism than the party dailies of the time allowed. For Nanning the restored evening paper once again became the city's official voice, in a form designed to be read by ordinary residents.

Growth in the reform era

On 1 January 1993 the paper was enlarged to a four-page broadsheet, the format change that marked most successful Chinese evening papers' transition in the early 1990s from small official sheets to substantial commercial newspapers. Through the 1990s it operated as the capital's established evening title while Guangxi's press market modernised around it — most notably with the founding in 1995 of Nanguo Morning News by the provincial Guangxi Daily group, which became the region's largest metropolitan paper. The Nanning Evening News retained its position as the municipal group's own city paper: the title rooted in Nanning itself, against a provincial competitor published in the same streets.

The 2005 merger and repositioning

From 1 January 2005 the paper was integrated with the Bagui Metropolitan News (八桂都市报) to form a renewed Nanning Evening News. In the reorganisation its supervising and publishing authority was settled as the Nanning Daily agency, and its positioning was formally changed to that of an urban, city-life newspaper (都市类报纸). The merger consolidated the municipal group's commercial titles into a single evening paper rather than allowing two similar products to divide the local market, and it completed the paper's long transition: a title that had been, in turn, a people's paper, a party daily, a revolutionary-committee organ and a restored party organ now stood explicitly as the city-life newspaper of Guangxi's capital.

Nanning, the city it serves

Nanning is the capital of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and its political, economic and cultural centre, in southern China near the border with Vietnam. It is the permanent host city of the China–ASEAN Expo, and Chinese official accounts describe it as a key gateway for China's cooperation with the ASEAN countries, linked to Southeast Asia through what has become known as the "Nanning Channel" of regular political, trade and cultural exchanges. The Nanning Evening News covers this city for its own residents: municipal news, livelihood and consumer stories, community reporting, culture and sport. Its ASEAN-facing setting gives its city coverage a distinctive outward dimension unusual among Chinese municipal evening papers, as the capital's development has been bound up with cross-border trade and the annual expo economy.

Place in the municipal group

The paper is published by the Nanning Daily Newspaper Group, the municipal press group built around the Nanning Daily, the organ of the Nanning municipal party committee. Together the Daily and the Evening News form the print core of Nanning's municipal media: the Daily carries official coverage in the party-organ tradition from which both titles descend, while the Evening News addresses the city as residents and consumers. As the group has developed digital and converged outlets, the evening title has continued as its principal city-life brand in print, the counterpart to the group's new-media operations.

Assessment

Few Chinese evening papers can document as complete a passage through the political history of the People's Republic as the Nanning Evening News. Founded in 1956 as the Nanning People's News, converted through the Nanning Daily into an evening paper in 1961, made an organ of a revolutionary committee in 1968, rehabilitated and restored as a party organ in 1979–80, enlarged in the commercial 1990s and merged and repositioned as a city-life paper in 2005, it embodies each successive model of the Chinese municipal newspaper in a single title. As Guangxi's earliest evening paper of the People's Republic era and Nanning's main evening title, it remains a central document of the capital's public life.

The ASEAN dimension of the paper's home city has only grown since. Nanning hosted the 23rd China–ASEAN Expo and the accompanying China–ASEAN Business and Investment Summit in the autumn of 2026, and official accounts of the event describe the city as a critical hub for China's cooperation with ASEAN, building on more than two decades as the expo's permanent host. For the Nanning Evening News, whose readers live in that gateway city, such events are at once national news and neighbourhood news — trade fairs and summits that fill the city's hotels, roads and markets, and that its livelihood and community coverage translates into terms of local jobs, prices and business.