About Pearl River Business News

Pearl River Business News

Pearl River Business News (Chinese: 珠江商报, pinyin: Zhujiang Shangbao) is a Chinese-language economic metropolitan newspaper based in Shunde District, Foshan, Guangdong Province. It is published by the Pearl River Business News Press under the Foshan media group, and it is centred on Shunde while being distributed across the whole of Foshan. The paper was founded on 26 March 1994 as Shunde News, the organ of the Shunde municipal committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and it took its present name on 29 July 2004 after its press was merged into the Foshan Daily newspaper group. Its history — a county-level party organ that survived the national cull of county newspapers, was absorbed into a prefectural group and repositioned as a business newspaper — reflects the restructuring of China's local press in the 2000s.

Founding as Shunde News in 1994

The newspaper was founded on 26 March 1994 by the Shunde municipal committee of the Chinese Communist Party under the name Shunde News (顺德报). Shunde was then a county-level city within Foshan, famous across China for its township enterprises and home-appliance manufacturing, and the new paper served as the official organ of the Shunde city committee and the Shunde city government. It was, for a county-level party paper, an unusually substantial publication: it appeared daily with a circulation of some 70,000 copies and was printed as a twelve-page broadsheet, the largest format of any party organ at county level in Guangdong and one of the very few such papers published every day.

As the committee's organ, Shunde News was the principal channel through which the Shunde party committee and government expressed their views and reported their work to the public. Its content concentrated on the work of the committee and government and on Shunde's economic and cultural construction, with a high proportion of local news. In the paper's first decade that local mission coincided with Shunde's prominence as a model of Pearl River Delta industrialisation.

Early digital steps

Shunde News was also an early mover online among county-level papers. It opened its own official website, Shunchang Net, and cooperated with national web portals such as Sina to present its news to internet users, raising the visibility of Shunde itself online. For a paper of its tier, maintaining a branded website and portal partnerships in the first years of the Chinese commercial internet was a notable step, and the site later provided the foundation for the group's Shunde news portal.

Surviving the 2003 county-newspaper rectification

The decisive moment in the paper's early history came on 15 July 2003, when the General Office of the Communist Party Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued their decision on the governance and rectification of newspapers and periodicals. Across Guangdong, many county-level newspapers were closed under the rectification. Shunde News, however, was one of only a small number of Guangdong county papers — five publishing organisations in the province, including the publishers of Nanhai Daily and Bao'an Daily — that were allowed to continue because of their sound operating condition.

Survival came with a change of ownership structure. The Foshan Daily newspaper group was formed on 28 December 2003 by combining Foshan Daily and Foshan Evening News with Shunde News and Nanhai Daily. Within the group, Shunde News was taken over, for consideration, as a subsidiary press. Its sister paper followed a parallel path: Nanhai Daily merged with Foshan Evening News and was relaunched as Pearl River Times in May 2004.

Relaunch as Pearl River Business News in 2004

On 29 July 2004 the former Shunde News was relaunched under its new name, Pearl River Business News, now appearing as a sixteen-page broadsheet. The new title announced the paper's repositioning: from the party organ of a single county-level city to an economic metropolitan newspaper for the wider Foshan and Pearl River Delta area. The paper passed into the structure created in January 2005, when Foshan consolidated its media into the Foshan Media Group — the first cross-media group in China, bringing newspapers together with Foshan People's Radio and Foshan Television — and its Shunde identity was retained within that larger system. Its website was renamed Shunde News Net in May 2012, aligning the digital brand with the district the paper chiefly serves.

Content and the return to Shunde

The relaunch initially took the paper away from its home ground. Seeking to become a newspaper covering the whole Pearl River Delta, Pearl River Business News for a time drifted from local financial and business information, the content its readers most associated with it. The experiment was not commercially successful, and the paper turned back to reporting principally on Shunde's economic and social development; special columns it had maintained for other Foshan districts such as Sanshui and Gaoming were discontinued as part of that refocusing.

In its mature form the paper is therefore best understood as a district business daily within a prefectural media system: centred on Shunde, one of China's most industrialised districts and a byword for private manufacturing, and distributed across Foshan as a whole. Its coverage emphasises the district's economy and business community alongside general metropolitan news.

Place within the Foshan media group

Pearl River Business News sits inside one of China's most integrated local media systems. The Foshan group that owns it grew from the 2003 newspaper merger into a cross-media organisation combining the Foshan Daily titles, radio and television, headquartered at the Foshan News Centre, which opened in Lecong, Shunde District, in March 2007 — itself a sign of Shunde's weight within the Foshan system. The group was restructured in December 2022 with the establishment of the Foshan News Media Centre, and in December 2025 it was renamed the Foshan Media Culture and Tourism Group, operating with the media centre as one institution under two names. Through each reorganisation, Pearl River Business News has continued as the group's Shunde-based business title, a line of continuity running back to the Shunde News of 1994.

Shunde, the district the paper serves

Shunde's own status changed around the paper: a county with centuries of history, it became a county-level city in 1992 and was then converted into a district of Foshan in the administrative reorganisation of 2003, the same process that folded its newspaper into the Foshan group. The district is known nationally for its manufacturing economy and for Cantonese cuisine, and its economic weight is the foundation on which a business-focused daily could be sustained where purely administrative county papers failed. The survival of the paper through the 2003 rectification, when most Guangdong county organs were closed, rested on this local economic strength and on the paper's comparatively healthy operations.

Summary

Pearl River Business News is a Chinese-language economic metropolitan newspaper published in Shunde District, Foshan, by the Pearl River Business News Press under the Foshan media group. Founded on 26 March 1994 as Shunde News, the organ of the Shunde municipal party committee, with some 70,000 daily copies in a twelve-page broadsheet format, it survived the 2003 rectification of county newspapers, joined the Foshan Daily newspaper group, and was relaunched under its present name on 29 July 2004 as a sixteen-page broadsheet. After an attempt to cover the whole Pearl River Delta, it refocused on Shunde's economy and society while distributing across Foshan.