About Ningde Television

Ningde Television

Overview

Ningde Television is the municipal television station of Ningde in northeastern Fujian, run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within its converged media centre. Its main channel broadcasts local news, marine-economy and livelihood programming in Mandarin. Ningde, on the East China Sea coast, has undergone one of the most remarkable transformations of any Chinese prefecture, from a relatively poor coastal area to a global battery-industry hub as the home of CATL, and its television station has reported that change from the front row.

The station's brief combines the old Ningde and the new. The old is a maritime prefecture of fishing ports, offshore aquaculture, island and mountain counties, white tea gardens and She ethnic communities. The new is a manufacturing powerhouse whose lithium-battery, new-energy-vehicle, stainless-steel and copper industries supply the world. Marine-economy programming, named in the station's remit, reflects the sea that still employs and feeds much of the population even as the factories rise behind the shore.

A Coast of Bays, Islands and Mountains

Ningde covers about 13,452 square kilometres of land and some 44,600 square kilometres of sea in northeastern Fujian, according to the Fujian provincial government. Its coastline is deeply indented, with Sandu Bay, one of China's great natural harbours, at its heart, and island and coastal counties including Fuding, Xiapu and Fu'an spread along the East China Sea. Inland, the prefecture rises into green mountains where Gutian, Pingnan, Zhouning and Shouning counties farm tea, mushrooms and fruit at altitude. The resident population was about 3.16 million at the end of 2023.

This geography gives the station two service areas in one: a maritime world of ports, fish farms and typhoon seasons, and a mountain world of terraced fields and county towns. Its news and features move between them constantly. The same prefecture that lands large yellow croaker from the rafts of Sandu Bay also grows the white tea of Fuding and the edible mushrooms of Gutian, known across China as a mushroom capital. Ningde Television's programmes hold these worlds together in a single local account.

Organisation and the Converged Media Centre

Ningde Television operates within the city's converged media centre, the unified local media organisation established under China's national media-convergence reform. The centre combines television, radio and official new-media production, gathering news once for broadcast and digital distribution. The main television channel remains the flagship, carrying local news, marine-economy and livelihood programming in Mandarin to audiences across the coast and mountains.

For a prefecture experiencing rapid industrial change, the converged newsroom provides continuity. Reporters can follow a story, a new battery plant, a harbour clean-up, a tea harvest, across television bulletins and mobile updates without duplication. The structure also serves the prefecture's geography: coastal and mountain counties generate news in different rhythms, fishing seasons against factory shifts, and a pooled centre can cover both. In Ningde the reform's promise, one newsroom for one prefecture, matches the reality of a place being remade as a whole.

The Battery Capital: CATL and the New Economy

The defining economic story of modern Ningde is the rise of Contemporary Amperex Technology, CATL, founded in the city in 2011 and grown into the world's leading maker of power batteries for electric vehicles, ranking first globally in power-battery use for many consecutive years and leading in energy-storage shipments as well. Around CATL, Ningde has built one of the world's largest lithium-ion battery industry clusters, with scores of upstream and downstream companies producing cathode and anode materials, separators, electrolytes and equipment, so that much of the supply chain can be sourced locally. Provincial reporting describes Ningde as the world's largest production base for polymer lithium-ion batteries.

The station's economic journalism follows this transformation in local terms: factory construction and jobs, the arrival of workers and engineers, training and housing, and the sister industries that grew alongside batteries, new-energy vehicles with a major SAIC base, stainless steel led by Tsingtuo Group, and copper materials. Together these four pillar industries have lifted Ningde from poverty-alleviation exemplar to advanced-manufacturing city. For the station, the task is to explain a global industry, whose customers include the world's great carmakers, through its effects on the streets and families of one coastal prefecture.

The Marine Economy and the Yellow Croaker

Alongside the factories, the sea remains Ningde's oldest employer, and marine-economy programming is a staple of the station's output. The prefecture is rich in marine resources: large yellow croaker, shrimp, cockles, oysters and seaweed are among its signature products, and the offshore rafts of Sandu'ao, Sandu Bay, form one of China's most extensive aquaculture landscapes. The station reports the fishing and farming seasons, harbour business, seafood prices and the modernisation of the rafts themselves, including experiments combining fish farming with solar power, wind and energy storage supplied by the prefecture's own battery industry.

Marine reporting also covers protection. Sandu Bay's clean-up and the regulation of ocean-ranch operations, removing polluting foam floats and ordering the aquaculture zones, have been major local campaigns, and the station follows the balance between production and ecology in the bay. Fishermen who once lived aboard their boats in the bay's floating communities have moved ashore into new villages, a social transformation the station has documented as community history as well as news. In Ningde, the marine economy is never only about fish; it is about how a coastal people lives.

Tea, Mushrooms and the Mountain Counties

Inland Ningde contributes its own famous products to the station's agricultural coverage. Fuding white tea, made from the leaves of the Fuding Dabai tea variety and prized for its gentle, ageing-friendly character, is one of China's celebrated teas, and the tea gardens of the coastal hills are a regular subject. Gutian county is known nationwide as a capital of edible mushrooms, where generations of farmers have built prosperity on fungi grown in the mountain climate, while Xiapu's tidal flats produce famous seafood and some of China's most photographed coastal scenery, as photographers gather for its mudflat light and fish-farm patterns.

The station's rural programming connects these county specialities into a prefecture-wide story about agricultural branding and rural income. It covers harvests, processing industries, geographical-indication protection and the e-commerce and tourism by which mountain and coastal products reach national markets. For farming and fishing households, this coverage is practical information; for urban viewers, it is a reminder that the battery city's hinterland still feeds it, and that Ningde's prosperity has rural as well as industrial roots.

She Culture, Scenery and the Poverty-Alleviation Story

Ningde is home to a significant population of the She people, one of China's recognised ethnic minorities, whose villages are concentrated in the prefecture's hills and whose culture of song, dress and festival is part of the station's cultural remit. Cultural programming also presents the prefecture's celebrated scenery: Taimu Mountain, whose granite peaks rise above the sea near Fuding, the shallow-water wonders of Baishuiyang in Pingnan, where visitors wade a smooth rock riverbed, Yangjia Stream and Yushan Island. Folk arts such as lion dances and paper-cutting appear in the station's features as the living traditions of its communities.

Ningde also holds a special place in China's poverty-alleviation history. The prefecture was once among Fujian's poorest areas, and its early experiments in targeted development, in places such as Xiadang township and the fishing village of Xiaqi, became nationally known examples. The station's reporting has followed the continuation of that story into rural revitalisation: mushroom sheds and tea gardens, cultural-creative villages such as Longtan in Pingnan, and the return of young people to mountain communities. In Ningde, development is not an abstract theme but the prefecture's own biography, and its television station is one of its principal narrators.

Public Service for Coast and Mountains

The station's public-service role spans both of its worlds. On the coast, typhoon warnings, fishing-safety information and harbour notices are essential seasonal services, delivered on television and, through the converged centre, to mobile audiences at sea and ashore. In the mountains, the station carries health, education and government-service information to counties where distances are long. Livelihood programming throughout addresses prices, employment in the new factories, training opportunities and services for the workers and families drawn to Ningde by its industries.

Rapid growth brings its own information needs: new residents need to learn their city, and old communities need a voice amid change. Ningde Television provides both, explaining the prefecture to newcomers and recording the older Ningde of fishing villages, tea hills and She songs for those who have always lived there. A station in a boomtown can easily become a cheerleader; the better local tradition, which Ningde's broadcaster is expected to uphold, is to be the community's record as well as its herald.

Ningde Television Today

Today Ningde Television broadcasts from the city's converged media centre, its main channel carrying local news, marine-economy and livelihood programming in Mandarin across northeastern Fujian. Its subjects mirror its prefecture: CATL and the battery cluster that made Ningde a global industrial name, the yellow-croaker rafts of Sandu Bay, Fuding white tea and Gutian mushrooms, Taimu Mountain's peaks above the sea, She villages in the hills and fishing families come ashore.

Few local stations have watched their home change as fast as Ningde Television has. Within a working lifetime, its prefecture moved from poverty-alleviation reports to dispatches from the centre of the world energy transition, without ceasing to be a place of fishermen and tea farmers. To cover both Ningdes faithfully, the old and the new, the marine and the industrial, is the station's continuing task, and the reason its marine-economy and livelihood remit matters as much as its business news.