About Qilu TV

Qilu TV

Qilu TV (the Qilu Channel) is the best-known terrestrial channel of Shandong Radio and Television, based in Jinan, Shandong. It is not the province's satellite flagship — that is Shandong TV — but the channel Shandong viewers themselves watch most: a Mandarin service of news, drama, variety and livelihood programming with a strong local Shandong identity, broadcast for provincial cable and terrestrial audiences. The channel is behind iqilu.com, Shandong Television's official portal. Qilu TV made national media history in its own right in late 2008, when it pioneered the practice — common abroad but rare in China — of interrupting taped programming to insert live breaking news, an experiment covered in depth by the Economic Observer. Its name, Qilu, is the ancient collective name for Shandong, from the states of Qi and Lu, the latter the home state of Confucius.

The Qilu name and Shandong identity

"Qilu" is more than a brand. The states of Qi and Lu were the two great powers of the Zhou-dynasty east, and their combined name has stood for the Shandong region for over two thousand years. Lu was the state of Confucius, and Qi, with its capital at Linzi, a centre of commerce and scholarship. Shandong Television's drama tradition has long drawn on this inheritance — academic studies of Shandong TV drama describe a "Lu school" of television series shaped by Qilu culture: farming traditions, the revolutionary heritage of the Yimeng mountains, Confucian ethics, immigrant and merchant traditions, with a grand, morally serious style. The Qilu Channel carries that regional identity into daily terrestrial broadcasting: it is the channel whose name promises Shandong viewers a service about themselves, in their own province's idiom, distinct from the satellite flagship's national address.

Within Shandong Radio and Television

Qilu TV's parent, Shandong Television (Shandong Radio & TV Station), was founded on 1 October 1960 and began broadcasting the same day from Jinan, covering the city and the rest of Shandong province, and now broadcasts in Chinese with its official website at iqilu.com. The provincial satellite channel went up in 1994 under the station's umbrella, leaving the terrestrial channels to do what Chinese provincial terrestrial channels do best: serve the home audience with local news, local service information and popular drama at high ratings within the province. In November 2023, Shandong Television launched an international communication centre, the group's outward-facing arm — a reminder that the terrestrial Qilu Channel's mission remained the complementary one: the home front. The Qilu Channel is the group's best-known terrestrial service, and iqilu.com — "i Qilu" — serves as the whole station's official online portal, carrying its news and programme presence to the web.

The 2008 breaking-news experiment

Qilu TV's most documented moment came in the autumn of 2008. The Economic Observer reported in December that year that a local television network in Shandong — Qilu Station, which claimed to be the network with the largest audience in Shandong — had been interrupting taped programmes to insert breaking news, a practice common in foreign countries but rare in China due to tight media control, and one media observers read as a cautious experiment responding to the central government's changed attitude toward news dissemination. The experiment began in October. On the afternoon of 9 October, a woman named Dong Mingxia suffered excessive blood loss delivering a baby in hospital; she had the rare Rh-negative AB blood type, the hospital's stocks were low, and donations were needed immediately. On learning of the case, Qilu interrupted its regular programme twice in different time slots to broadcast her plight. After that incident, the station interrupted its programmes on five further occasions for breaking news, ranging from the chemical poisoning of workers and villagers by a factory leak to a fire. To feed such coverage it set up an "exclusive news" operation staffed by its satellite news gathering (SNG) team — facilities most Chinese stations owned but few deployed for live emergency feeds. The station's chief, Yan Aihua, told the newspaper: "We want to highlight the role of television station as a timely information dissemination platform."

Live from the Jinan Olympic Sports Center fire

The experiment's most visible test came on 11 November 2008, when the roof of the Jinan Olympic Sports Center caught fire. Qilu provided a live broadcast from the scene, as well as coverage of the relief efforts and the municipal government's press conference afterwards — the full grammar of rolling news, exercised by a provincial terrestrial channel in its own capital city. A Qilu manager told the Economic Observer that supervisory officials had recently held discussions with media organisations rather than simply issuing orders, and offered the fire coverage as an example of a more relaxed reporting environment. The episode has been remembered as a marker in the history of Chinese television news: evidence that, within limits, a local channel could behave like a live news broadcaster, and that audiences and regulators alike responded when it did.

Drama on the terrestrial channel

Drama is the other pillar of Qilu TV's schedule, and its terrestrial ratings can be strong enough to create their own news. The anti-Japanese war drama Courageous Forward (Moving Forward) premiered on Shandong Radio and Television Station's Qilu Channel in 2020, received very good ratings, and won the annual "Ratings Ace Award" issued by Qilu Channel itself before moving to the iQiyi streaming platform; trade commentary noted that the award reflected terrestrial-channel ratings only, but that the series' popularity within its home range was plain. Rural drama — a Shandong speciality rooted in the province's storytelling traditions — also features in the channel's premieres; the contemporary rural series The Sun Shines on Me, about a young township cadre leading her village toward prosperity, was broadcast on terrestrial channels including Shandong Qilu. The pattern is the classic terrestrial one across China: a strong provincial channel premieres drama to loyal local audiences before, or instead of, national satellite exposure.

Public service and the Qilu brand

The Qilu brand extends beyond scheduling into civic ritual. In March 2015, the Qilu Public Welfare Ceremony — an annual event honouring public-welfare deeds across the province, that year including the Pingyi gypsum mine life rescue among its ten awards — was broadcast live by Qilu Channel from the Shandong Radio and Television Station, jointly sponsored by the station's Qilu Channel, Shandong Business Daily and Qilu Network, with the whole ceremony streamed by Qilu Network and covered by media inside and outside the province. Reporters' behind-the-scenes notes from the ceremony show the channel's journalists embedded in the province's charitable life — following, for example, a deaf student from Tengzhou who had scored 675 points by self-study. This is the livelihood-and-community register that defines Chinese terrestrial channels at their best, and it is central to Qilu TV's self-presentation: not a distant national broadcaster, but the province's own channel, present at its emergencies, ceremonies and everyday struggles.

Digital presence: iqilu.com

Qilu TV is the channel behind iqilu.com, the Qilu Network — Shandong Television's official site, whose very name binds the station's digital identity to the Qilu brand rather than to the satellite flagship. The portal carries the station's news output, including an English-language international communication channel presenting Shandong news — provincial development, culture, business and events — to overseas readers. Through the portal and the station's mobile and social distribution, Qilu Channel content — its news, its ceremonies, its drama premieres — reaches the online audience that terrestrial broadcasting alone no longer captures, while the channel itself remains anchored in the province's cable and terrestrial systems.

Position and significance

Qilu TV's significance in Chinese television is disproportionate to its footprint. Nationally, it is remembered for 2008: the autumn a provincial terrestrial channel interrupted its own programmes for live breaking news, mobilised its SNG crews for emergencies from a hospital blood appeal to a stadium fire, and made the argument — in public, through its own chief — that a television station should be a timely information platform. Within Shandong, it is simply the home channel: the Qilu-named, Jinan-based service of news, drama, variety and livelihood programming that embodies the province's identity, fronts the group's official portal, and carries a cultural name — Qi and Lu, Confucius's country — that no satellite competitor can borrow. For directories of Chinese media, it is the essential Shandong entry after the satellite flagship itself.