About People's Daily

People's Daily

The People's Daily, known in Chinese as Renmin Ribao, is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the most authoritative newspaper in the People's Republic of China. Published in Beijing by People's Daily Press, a ministerial-level institution, it provides direct information on the policies and viewpoints of the CCP in Chinese and in multiple other languages, and it is described as the largest newspaper in China. Its editorials are read by foreign observers and Chinese readers alike as authoritative statements of official government policy, and the volume and placement of its coverage of a person, idea or place is often taken as a signal of political standing. The paper is headquartered at No. 2 Jintai Xilu in Beijing's Chaoyang District, and its main Chinese website is people.com.cn, with an English edition at en.people.cn.

History

The People's Daily was established on 15 June 1948, during the Chinese Civil War, and was first published in Pingshan County, Hebei. It was formed from the merger of the Jin-Cha-Ji Daily and the newspapers of the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu base area, and it initially served as the organ of the CCP's North China Bureau, which is why it was historically known as the North China People's Daily or the People's Daily Pingshan Edition. On 15 March 1949 its offices moved to Beijing, and the original Beijing edition was renamed Beijing Liberation Daily. The North China edition ceased publication on 31 July 1949, after a total of 406 issues. On 1 August 1949, shortly before the founding of the People's Republic of China on 1 October that year, the People's Daily became the official newspaper of the CCP Central Committee, the role it has held ever since.

From its founding, the paper was under the direct control of the CCP's top leadership. Deng Tuo served as editor-in-chief from 1948 to 1958 and Wu Lengxi from 1958 to 1966, although historians note that the paper was in fact closely controlled by Hu Qiaomu, a personal secretary to Mao Zedong. That direct line to the leadership made the People's Daily both powerful and vulnerable whenever China's politics shifted, a pattern that would recur throughout its history.

The Cultural Revolution and reform era

At the outset of the Cultural Revolution, the leadership of many news outlets was purged. On the afternoon of 31 May 1966, Chen Boda led a work team in what he described as a small coup at the paper, seizing control from Wu Lengxi and the editorial board. The People's Daily and the journal Red Flag then came under a work team headed by Chen, and together with the People's Liberation Army Daily they became known as the Two Newspapers and One Journal. On 1 June 1966 the paper published a militant editorial entitled Sweep Away All Cow Demons and Snake Spirits, advocating the Cultural Revolution and struggle against so-called rightists.

In the late 1970s, editor-in-chief Hu Jiwei argued, as part of a wider debate over the role of journalism in China, for the primacy of what he called the people's spirit. He maintained that state media should report truthfully, represent the interests of the public and serve as the eyes and ears of the CCP, accurately reflecting reality and conveying citizens' voices to the leadership. His reformist stance was endorsed by CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang but opposed by Hu Qiaomu, who argued for the absolute primacy of the party spirit. Hu Jiwei was forced to resign in 1983, yet the paper continued to follow elements of his vision through the 1980s, notably featuring the investigative journalism of Liu Binyan.

The paper in 1989 and after

During the 1989 student movement, the People's Daily became contested ground between its sympathetic staff and hardline party leaders. Under pressure, the paper published the editorial of 26 April 1989, penned by deputy publicity minister Zeng Jianhui at the direction of Deng Xiaoping, which sharply escalated tensions between the government and protesters. On 4 June, the day of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the People's Daily was the only major newspaper in China to report on its front page that the army had killed civilians in Beijing, juxtaposing the news amid official government announcements. Many headlines and layouts in that day's issue served as implicit protests. Following the crackdown, the paper's leadership was purged and an editor, Wu Xuecan, was sentenced to four years in prison.

Since the mid-1990s the paper has faced declining government subsidies combined with increasing competition from international news sources and Chinese commercial tabloids. Its response, shared with much of China's press, was modernisation: an online edition, expanded colour printing, overseas social media accounts and, more recently, data and artificial intelligence services. In March 2018 the People's Daily won a place in the Third National Top 100 Newspapers in China.

Ownership and organisation

The People's Daily is owned by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and published by People's Daily Press, a ministerial-level institution directly under the party's top leadership. The same press is also responsible for the publication of the Global Times, the nationalist tabloid founded in 1993 as a Chinese-language publication, whose English edition was launched in 2009. The newspaper's senior leadership listed in recent reference works includes President Tuo Zhen and editor Yu Shaoliang. Below the flagship title, the People's Daily organisation maintains specialist operations that reflect its institutional weight, including a unit called People's Data, which conducts overseas social media data collection and analysis for police, judicial authorities and CCP organisations and has data-sharing agreements with companies including DiDi and Pinduoduo's parent company.

Editions and languages

The newspaper is published worldwide in four editions. The Mainland China Edition is the domestic edition, aimed mainly at readers in mainland China. The Hong Kong Edition is aimed mainly at readers in Hong Kong. The Overseas Edition is aimed mainly at readers outside mainland China and Hong Kong, and the Tibetan version serves Tibetan readers in the Tibet Autonomous Region and Tibetan-populated areas of Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai, Gansu and other provinces. The overseas edition was launched on 1 July 1985 and was originally published in traditional Chinese characters; after 1 July 1992 it changed to simplified Chinese characters, and its website is Haiwainet.

Beyond those four editions, the paper appears in a wide range of languages. In addition to its main Chinese-language edition, reference sources list editions in English, Spanish, Japanese, French, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic and Korean, as well as editions in minority languages used in China, including Tibetan, Kazakh, Uyghur, Zhuang and Mongolian. The mainland edition, which originally had four pages, grew over time to 24 pages from Monday to Friday, with smaller weekend and holiday issues; from 2019 it has had 20 pages on weekdays and eight pages on weekends and holidays, printed in full colour. People's Daily Publishing House also issues reduced-print bound volumes of the paper, one volume every half month, totalling 24 volumes per year, with content and layout basically the same as the original newspaper.

Editorial style and commentary

The People's Daily is the official mouthpiece of the Central Committee of the CCP, and it is often viewed as the most representative carrier of the mainstream perspective of China's government and of the CCP leadership's priorities. A careful distinction is made between its editorials, commentaries and opinion pieces. All must be government-approved, but they differ by design in how much official authoritativeness they carry. An opinion piece may express a viewpoint or contain a debate that is still under consideration, reflecting only the writer's views and sometimes serving as a trial balloon to assess internal public opinion. An official editorial, by contrast, is relatively infrequent and means the government has reached a final decision on an issue.

The paper employs writing task groups to compose editorial pieces that signal the significance of a piece or its relationship to official views. These groups publish under pen names, known as signatures, whose construction often encodes their purpose. Ren Zhongping, formed from characters meaning important People's Daily commentary, represents the view of the People's Daily as an organisation. Zhong Sheng, a homophone for voice of China, is used for commentary on major international affairs. Guo Jiping is used for editorials outlining China's stance on major international issues, and such articles are rarer and generally longer than Zhong Sheng pieces. Other signatures documented in reference works include Guo Ping, for articles focusing on Xi Jinping and his political thought, and Zhong Zuwen, for pieces from the CCP's Central Organisation Department.

Readership and circulation

The People's Daily is published worldwide with a circulation reported at around 3 million copies, with some accounts giving a range of 3 to 4 million. That scale, combined with its official status, makes it one of the most widely distributed newspapers in China as well as the paper whose contents are most closely monitored abroad. Within China, party and government institutions have historically formed a core part of its readership, while its overseas and foreign-language editions address readers outside the mainland. Because subsidies declined and commercial rivals multiplied from the mid-1990s, the paper has also had to compete for ordinary readers and advertisers in a way its earlier, fully supported incarnation did not, even as its political role remained unchanged.

Digital presence

The People's Daily began an online edition in 1997 as part of its effort to modernise, and the operation was reorganised as People's Daily Online in 2000. People's Daily Online, known in Chinese as Renmin Wang, includes pages in Arabic, French, Russian, Spanish, Japanese and English. Compared with the original Chinese version, the foreign-language versions offer less in-depth discussion of domestic policies and affairs and more editorials about China's foreign policies and motives. The web bulletin forums, such as the Strengthening Nation Forum in the Chinese edition, became known for surprisingly candid content. The newspaper launched a Chinese-language application in 2014, followed on 15 October 2017 by an English-language version. In recent years it has expanded on overseas social media platforms, where it has millions of followers on its Facebook page and accounts on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube, and it maintains agreements with foreign newspapers to republish its content.

More recently, the organisation has moved into technology services built around its editorial authority. In 2022 it launched a commercial software service called Renmin Shenjiao, or People's Proofreader, providing outsourced content review. It also provides Chinese artificial intelligence companies with training data considered permissible by CCP leaders, and in 2024 it released a large language model-based writing tool called Easy Write. These ventures illustrate how a newspaper founded as a regional party organ in 1948 has extended its role from printing official policy to supplying data and tools for the digital information environment, while its core function, publishing the Central Committee's flagship daily in Beijing and around the world, remains the same.