About Pingxiang Television

Pingxiang Television

Overview

Pingxiang Television is the municipal television station of Pingxiang in western Jiangxi, run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within its converged media centre. Its main channel broadcasts local news and community programming in Mandarin. Pingxiang is a small prefecture by Jiangxi standards, set against the Hunan border, but it holds an outsized place in modern Chinese history: its Anyuan district was the scene of one of the earliest and most famous labour movements of the Chinese Communist Party, and its Wugong Mountain is now among China's most popular hiking destinations.

The station therefore works with two strong local themes, red history and mountain scenery, inside the ordinary frame of a city broadcaster. It reports the municipal government, a coal and industrial-ceramics economy in transition, and the community life of a border prefecture whose people have long moved between Jiangxi and Hunan for work and trade. Community programming, named in its remit, suits a compact city where the station's audience is close at hand and its subjects are neighbours.

A Border City Between Jiangxi and Hunan

Pingxiang lies in the west of Jiangxi, pressed against the border with Hunan, in the hill country where the Luoxiao Mountains divide the two provinces. The city has long been a corridor: the railway and roads from Jiangxi's interior to Changsha and the Hunan plain pass through Pingxiang, and its county-level divisions include Luxi, Shangli and Lianhua counties alongside the Anyuan and Xiangdong districts. Its history is tied to coal, for the mines at Anyuan, developed from the late nineteenth century to fuel the railway and industry of the region, made this corner of Jiangxi an industrial enclave in an agricultural province.

That border position shapes the station's outlook. Pingxiang looks west to Hunan as naturally as east to Nanchang, and many of its stories, labour migration, cross-border trade, tourism flows to Wugong Mountain, involve both provinces. The station's service area is small enough for a genuinely local feel, yet its subjects reach across a provincial frontier, giving Pingxiang Television a slightly outward gaze unusual in so compact a prefecture.

Organisation and the Converged Media Centre

Pingxiang Television operates within the city's converged media centre, formed under the national reform that integrated local television, radio and official new media into single local organisations, a reform Jiangxi completed at prefecture level across all eleven of its cities by 2023. The centre gathers news once and distributes it across broadcast and digital platforms, with the main television channel carrying local news and community programming in Mandarin as its flagship service.

For a small city station, convergence is a means of survival and of reach. Pooling reporters and production across the centre lets Pingxiang sustain coverage of its signature subjects, Anyuan's heritage and Wugong Mountain's visitor seasons, while serving a young audience that increasingly meets local news on phones. A hiking festival livestreamed from the alpine meadows, or a commemoration at the Anyuan memorial carried simultaneously on television and mobile, shows the model at work: one local newsroom, every screen in the city.

Local News and Community Programming

News and community service form the centre of the schedule. Pingxiang Television reports the municipal government, urban districts and county administrations, public services, education, health and community events across the prefecture. The industrial transition of a historic coal city is a standing theme: the restructuring of mining, the development of industrial ceramics, for which Pingxiang is a noted production base, and newer industries and services as the city diversifies beyond the pit economy that created it.

Community programming addresses the near at hand: neighbourhood affairs, consumer and livelihood information, local sport and culture, and the concerns of mining families and county towns alike. Lianhua county, in the prefecture's south, is the home county of a remarkable number of generals of the revolutionary generation, giving it the local nickname of a general county, and its stories enter the station's community coverage alongside those of the urban districts. In a small prefecture, such programming is television as civic glue, and Pingxiang's station is built to provide it.

Anyuan: Cradle of the Labour Movement

Anyuan is Pingxiang's gift to national history. The coal mine and railway workshops at Anyuan, just east of the city, employed thousands of workers in harsh conditions, and in the early 1920s they became a focus of the young Chinese Communist Party's organising. Mao Zedong visited Anyuan from 1921, and organisers including Li Lisan and Liu Shaoqi built a workers' school, a club and a Party cell among the miners. In September 1922 some ten thousand miners and fifteen hundred railway workers struck, and within five days won most of their demands for back pay and better conditions, a landmark victory that made Anyuan famous as China's little Moscow.

The Anyuan Road and Mine Workers' Movement Memorial Hall, a nationally protected site, preserves this history amid the old mining area's brick tunnels and factory buildings, and Pingxiang Television's history programming returns to it regularly: commemorations, exhibitions, school education visits and the red tourism that brings visitors to the district. The famous Cultural Revolution-era painting of the young Mao going to Anyuan fixed the district's image in the national mind, and the station works with that inheritance, presenting Anyuan's labour history as the city's own family story, told where it happened.

Wugong Mountain and the Outdoor Economy

If Anyuan is Pingxiang's past glory, Wugong Mountain is its present magnet. The Wugong range, spanning Pingxiang, Yichun and Ji'an in the northern Luoxiao Mountains, rises to Baihe Peak, the Golden Summit, at 1,918.3 metres. Historically counted among the famous mountains south of the Yangtze alongside Lushan and Hengshan, Wugong is now celebrated for its vast alpine meadows, seas of cloud and star-filled camping skies, which have made it one of China's most beloved hiking and outdoor-festival mountains, drawing young travellers from across the country.

The station covers Wugong Mountain as both scenery and industry. Tourism programming presents the meadows, waterfalls and temple sites of the Pingxiang section, while news reporting follows the visitor economy: trail and cableway services, mountain festivals, homestays in the townships at the mountain's foot, and the safety and environmental management that mass hiking requires. For a coal city seeking a new image, the green mountain is a powerful emblem, and its television station is one of the chief instruments by which that new image is made and maintained.

Coal, Ceramics and a City in Transition

Pingxiang's economy was built on coal, and the station's economic reporting follows the long transition of a resource city. The Anyuan mine and the prefecture's other collieries shaped its towns, its workforce and its culture for more than a century. As reserves decline and policy favours cleaner industry, coverage tracks mine restructuring, the re-employment of mining workers, land restoration in old coal districts and the growth of replacement industries, among which industrial ceramics, electric porcelain and related materials are Pingxiang specialities with national markets.

Agriculture and county development complete the economic picture: the rice, tea-oil and fruit of the hill counties, and the rural revitalisation of townships under Wugong Mountain that now earn from visitors as much as from crops. The station presents transition not as an abstraction but as its audience lives it, in changed jobs, new industrial parks and villages repainted for tourists. Few stories matter more to a resource city's residents, and the local broadcaster is where that story is told in full.

Culture Between Two Provinces

Pingxiang's culture bears the marks of its border position. Its folk traditions mix Jiangxi and Hunan influences, its tables draw on the spicy cuisines of both provinces, and its people have a long history of movement across the Luoxiao passes for trade, work and marriage. The station's cultural programming records this borderland life: spring and autumn folk customs, local opera and performance traditions, the food culture of the mining towns, and the festivals of the mountain counties.

The Autumn Harvest Uprising of 1927, whose forces moved through the Hunan-Jiangxi border country including Pingxiang's counties before the march to Jinggangshan, adds another layer of red memory to the prefecture's culture, commemorated in the city at the Autumn Harvest Uprising Square and its exhibition hall. Between Anyuan's strike, the uprising's passage and Wugong's meadows, Pingxiang's cultural calendar gives its small station an unusually full programme of anniversaries, festivals and visitor seasons to cover.

Pingxiang Television Today

Today Pingxiang Television broadcasts from the city's converged media centre, its main channel carrying local news and community programming in Mandarin across western Jiangxi's border prefecture. Its defining subjects are Pingxiang's own: the Anyuan memorial and the memory of the 1922 strike, the alpine meadows of Wugong Mountain, coal and ceramics in transition, and the close-knit community life of a small city between two provinces.

The station's value is the value of local television at its most concentrated. National media visit Pingxiang for Anyuan anniversaries and Wugong's hiking season; Pingxiang Television is there every day, for the council meeting, the mine-community event, the mountain weather warning and the village festival. In a prefecture small enough to feel like a neighbourhood and historic enough to matter to a nation, that daily presence is precisely the service a city broadcaster exists to give.