About Pu'er Daily

Pu'er Daily

Pu'er Daily (普洱日报, Pu'er Ribao) is the Chinese-language daily newspaper of Pu'er, a prefecture-level city in southern Yunnan, China, on the borders with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. It is the official newspaper of the Pu'er Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the city's party paper of record. First issued in 1979, according to the Yunnan provincial newspaper annals, it chronicles one of China's most distinctive local economies: the home of Pu'er tea, a centre of the Chinese coffee industry, and a Lancang (Mekong) River borderland of Dai, Lahu, Wa, Hani and other peoples. Its website is perb.cn, and its printed pages are also reproduced as a digital e-paper.

First issued in 1979

The Yunnan provincial newspaper annals, as reproduced in reference tables of the province's press, date Pu'er Daily's first issue to 1979 — the first year of China's reform era, when prefecture-level party newspapers were being founded or revived across the country. The city it served was then called Simao: the prefecture and its seat carried the Simao name from 1950 until 2007, when the city formally took back the name Pu'er — the name of the tea that had made it famous for centuries — and the old Simao name survived only as the city's central district. The newspaper's e-paper still reflects that history: its digital editions carry district special pages, including a Simao special page, alongside the main Pu'er Daily pages.

A city party newspaper among 330

Pu'er Daily belongs to the tier of Chinese journalism formed by the party committees of prefecture-level cities. People's Daily Online, reporting a national summit of such papers in 2019, put the number of city party newspapers in China at more than 330. These papers share a common structure — owned by the municipal party committee, publishing its announcements and policies alongside local news — but each is shaped by its city's economy. In Pu'er's case that economy is written into the masthead itself: no other Chinese city party paper takes its name from a tea.

The tea beat

Pu'er is the source of the name of Pu'er tea, the fermented dark tea traded for centuries along the Ancient Tea Horse Road from the tea mountains of southern Yunnan to Tibet and Southeast Asia. The newspaper's home territory includes the old tea forests of Jingmai Mountain, whose cultural landscape of ancient tea plantations was the subject of a World Heritage application effort that drew national attention — in 2016, when thirty-nine Chinese media organisations from Southeast Asia toured Pu'er, their itinerary centred on the tea exchanges, the Tea Horse Road relics and the Jingmai tea mountains, alongside the city's National Green Economy Experimental Zone. Tea prices, harvests, branding and the tea-tourism economy are standing items in the paper's coverage, as they have been throughout the modern tea boom that began in the 1990s. When the Southeast Asian Chinese media tour came to Pu'er in the spring of 2016 — thirty-nine Chinese media organisations from Southeast Asia, hosted by the municipal party committee's publicity department with China News Service — its itinerary read like the paper's own front pages: the Yunnan Coffee Exchange and the Pu'er Tea Exchange in the city, the Nakeli station of the old Tea Packhorse Trail in Ning'er County, the Lahu village of Laodabao in Lancang County with its villager-performed songs and dances, and the tea forests of Jingmai Mountain, where the harmony of people and tea trees was presented as the heart of the World Heritage application.

The coffee beat

Pu'er's second defining crop is coffee. People's Daily Online reported the founding of the National Coffee Trading Center in Pu'er in a story sourced directly to Pu'er Daily, which described the municipal government's signing ceremony with the Kunming Jinyuan Flower Industry company in July of that year. The figures the paper reported give the scale of its beat: some 716,000 mu of coffee fields in Pu'er producing about 45,000 tons, the largest planting area and yield of any city in Yunnan — in a province that grows more than 98 per cent of China's coffee by both area and output, on over 1.8 million mu. Coffee had been planted around Pu'er for over a century, but its industrial scale dates from the 1980s; the trading centre, with a headquarters, three collection centres and a delivery centre, was designed to give the region a national trading and pricing platform, a story the city paper both covered and, as the cited source, documented for national media.

National recognition for media convergence

On 28 August 2019, at the National Party Newspaper Media Convergence Summit held in Kunming, Pu'er Daily was awarded the title of National Party Newspaper Media Integration and Innovation Unit. People's Daily Online reported that thirty-five newspapers received the honour that year, out of the more than 330 city party newspapers in China. The award recognised the paper's work in merging its traditional print operation with digital and mobile publishing — the national policy, pursued across the Chinese press since the mid-2010s, of building converged newsrooms in which one editorial team publishes to newspaper, website, app and social platforms together.

Convergence on the ground

The same process reached Pu'er's counties at the turn of that year. In late December 2018, county-level media convergence centres were inaugurated across the city: Jiangcheng County's centre on 26 December, Jinggu and Lancang counties' on 27 December, and Simao District's on 29 December, in accordance with central, provincial and municipal requirements to integrate traditional and emerging media at county level. The prefecture's media map thus came to pair the city-level Pu'er Daily with a tier of county convergence centres beneath it — the structure within which Pu'er's local journalism now operates. The paper's own reporting is also amplified through organised media tours and exchanges: Pu'er hosted national media visits on its green-development model in 2019, when journalists from more than twenty national outlets toured the city under the theme "Green Development in Pu'er".

The borderland beat

Pu'er's geography shapes the rest of the paper's agenda. The city lies along the middle and lower reaches of the Lancang River, upstream of the Mekong's course through Laos and Vietnam, and shares borders with Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam. Its population of about 2.34 million is ethnically diverse, and its public life includes the festivals of its peoples — the Mojiang twins festival, the Lahu New Year celebrations at Laodabao, the Wa wooden-drum festival of Ximeng, and the coffee culture season — all recurring items in the local press. Since 1996 Pu'er has also been paired with Shanghai under the east–west cooperation programme, a relationship the city's media mark with anniversary coverage of Shanghai-funded projects in industry, medicine, education and employment across the prefecture.

Digital editions

Pu'er Daily publishes online at perb.cn and through a full digital e-paper that reproduces the printed pages, complete with page-level special sections for the city's districts. People's Daily Online maintains a dedicated Pu'er channel drawing on the city's news output, one of the routes by which the city paper's reporting — like its coffee trading centre story — reaches national and international readers in English as well as Chinese.

Pu'er Daily today

More than four decades after its 1979 founding, Pu'er Daily remains the Pu'er municipal party committee's newspaper and the city's record of itself: a party daily whose distinction is the economy it covers. Between the tea mountains that gave the city its name and the coffee fields that made it China's coffee capital, and along a Lancang River frontier touching three countries, it continues in print and digital form — recognised nationally, in 2019, as one of China's thirty-five leading city party newspapers for media integration and innovation.