About Orange News

Orange News

Orange News (橙新聞) is a Chinese-language online news website based in Hong Kong and published at orangenews.hk. Established in December 2014, it is an online-only outlet owned by Sino United Publishing, Hong Kong's largest integrated Chinese publishing group, and operated through the group's subsidiary Cloud Connect Technology (雲通科技). The site covers Hong Kong, mainland China, finance and lifestyle, and its editorial stance is generally regarded as pro-Beijing. Orange News was created to serve readers both inside Hong Kong and beyond it, targeting residents of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area as well as the Hong Kong diaspora overseas.

Founding and launch

Orange News was established by Sino United Publishing under its subsidiary Cloud Connect Technology in December 2014. The timing mattered. The site appeared in the closing weeks of Hong Kong's 2014 Umbrella Movement, a period of intense political argument in which online media had become a central battleground for competing accounts of the city's future. A new, well-resourced Chinese-language digital outlet, built by an established publishing house rather than by independent journalists, was a notable addition to that landscape. From the outset, according to its founding description, the site aimed at two audiences at once: people living in the Greater Bay Area, the mainland-centred economic region into which Hong Kong was being integrated, and Hongkongers who had moved abroad but continued to follow news from home.

Ownership and the Sino United Publishing group

To understand Orange News, it is necessary to understand its parent. Sino United Publishing (Holdings) Limited is Hong Kong's largest integrated publishing group. It was formed in 1988 from the integration of historic publishing agencies, and it wholly owns the three best-known Chinese-language publishing houses in the territory: Joint Publishing, the Chung Hwa Book Company and the Commercial Press Hong Kong. The group's business spans publishing, distribution, retail, printing and cultural exchanges, it runs dozens of retail outlets in Hong Kong — 51 bookstores have been reported — and it has subsidiaries and affiliated agencies in Macao, mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia, North America and Europe. It is credited with around 80 per cent of Hong Kong's book publishing market. Orange News is the group's online news face: the point at which a book-publishing and bookselling empire meets daily digital journalism.

The 2015 ownership revelations

In April 2015, Hong Kong's Next Magazine reported that Orange News was controlled by the Liaison Office of the Central People's Government in Hong Kong, Beijing's representative office in the city. Investigative reporting revealed that Sino United Publishing was owned through a company called Guangdong New Culture Development, described as a shell company fully owned by the Liaison Office, which also held controlling stakes — reported at 99.99 per cent and 88.44 per cent respectively — in Ta Kung Pao and Wen Wei Po, Hong Kong's two long-established pro-Beijing newspapers. The website, Next Magazine reported, was also funded by the Liaison Office. Following those revelations, other media outlets widely described Orange News as being under Liaison Office control, and the same reporting established that the Liaison Office had taken control of Sino United Publishing itself. The disclosures turned a publishing-industry story into a political one: the group behind Hong Kong's dominant Chinese book trade, and behind Orange News, was reported to sit within Beijing's own institutional structure in the city.

Editorial stance

Orange News's editorial stance is generally regarded as pro-Beijing, and its commentary pages illustrate what that means in practice. A 2024 study of Sino United's media operations by Lingua Sinica described the pattern in detail. When the Hong Kong Journalists Association elected a new board in 2024, Orange News ran three strongly worded editorials within the space of 24 hours. In one, current affairs commentator Liang Wenwen wrote that the journalists' association had "always in the past upheld the banner of 'press freedom' to loudly criticize the government", with repeated air-quoted references to "press freedom". In another, writer Han Jinluo alleged that under its newly elected chair — Selina Cheng, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was subsequently terminated — the association would become "a cheerleading team for the American government". Commentary of this kind positions Orange News within the pro-establishment camp of Hong Kong media: supportive of the Hong Kong and central governments, and sharply critical of pro-democracy figures, press-freedom advocates and foreign governments it portrays as hostile to China.

What Orange News publishes

Day to day, Orange News operates as a full-service Chinese-language news site rather than a purely political one. Its coverage spans Hong Kong news, mainland Chinese news, finance and lifestyle content — the mix signalled in its own positioning toward Greater Bay Area readers, for whom Hong Kong and mainland affairs, markets and everyday consumer news form a single information diet. Its editor-in-chief is listed as Chen Ching-wai. The site sits alongside the Liaison Office-linked newspapers Ta Kung Pao, Wen Wei Po and Hong Kong Commercial Daily in the Chinese-language media stable associated with Beijing's Hong Kong apparatus, but it differs from them in form: where those titles began as print newspapers, Orange News was born digital, designed for readers who encounter news on phones and social feeds rather than on paper.

Place in Hong Kong's media system

Orange News is frequently cited in international reporting about the structure of media power in Hong Kong. When Radio Free Asia reported in 2021 on plans to bring Chinese-funded institutions in Hong Kong under more unified oversight, it listed the Liaison Office's media holdings as the Wen Wei Po, Ta Kung Pao and Hong Kong Commercial Daily newspapers "as well as the online Orange News". Analysts of the Hong Kong publishing industry make the same connection from the other direction: Sino United's control of more than 80 per cent of the local publishing market, its three major bookstore chains and its digital news outlet are treated as different faces of a single media empire. The International Publishers Association and the European and International Booksellers Federation warned in April 2024 that publishing freedoms were under threat in Hong Kong, concerns in which the concentration of the book trade in Sino United's hands has featured prominently.

Audience and reach

The audience Orange News was built to reach explains much of its content mix. Greater Bay Area residents move between Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Macao for work and business, and they need a single source that treats those cities as one region. The Hong Kong diaspora, which grew substantially after 2020, follows Hong Kong politics and society from London, Toronto, Sydney and elsewhere. A Chinese-language site funded at group level, free of the commercial pressures on independent outlets, and aligned editorially with Beijing's account of Hong Kong's integration into the region, is designed to speak to both groups — reinforcing, for readers at home and abroad, a narrative of Hong Kong as a functioning part of a rising Chinese bay area.

Significance

Orange News matters less for any single story it has published than for what its existence demonstrates about Hong Kong media after 2014. It shows a state-linked publishing group — one whose core businesses are books, bookshops and distribution — extending itself into online news at the moment digital platforms became the main arena of public argument in Hong Kong. Its ownership, revealed within months of its launch, placed it openly within the institutional orbit of Beijing's Liaison Office, while its editorial voice has remained consistently pro-establishment. For researchers, regulators and readers trying to map who owns Hong Kong's Chinese-language media, Orange News is a standard reference point: a digital-native outlet whose parent company, funding and stance have all been publicly documented.