About Qinghai TV

Qinghai TV

Overview

Qinghai TV, or Qinghai Satellite Television, is the provincial satellite channel based in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province in northwestern China. Provincial listings give Qinghai Satellite Television a 1997 launch, and the station behind it, Qinghai Television, abbreviated QHTV, was founded on 1 January 1971. The channel broadcasts Mandarin news, drama and entertainment, including plateau and Tibetan-region culture, for Qinghai and for nationwide audiences. It is one of the smallest provincial satellite services in China by home population, yet one of the most distinctive: it serves a high plateau province of fewer than six million people, works in four languages, and since 2009 has been operated in partnership with Hunan Broadcasting System, the broadcaster behind China's most popular provincial channel.

Qinghai takes its name from Qinghai Lake, the largest inland saltwater lake in China, and most of the province lies on the Tibetan Plateau. Xining, its capital, is the largest city on the plateau and the gateway to it. Qinghai TV is the screen of that world: source of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers, home to Tibetan, Hui, Tu, Mongol and Salar peoples, and a landscape of grassland, salt lakes and monasteries.

History: from Xining Television to the satellite era

Qinghai Television was originally named Xining Television Station. It was built and began trial broadcasts on 1 July 1970, and officially broadcast from 1 January 1971 — the founding date the network still carries. In May 1980 it was officially renamed Qinghai Television Station, taking the name of the province rather than the capital city as its service grew beyond Xining. Those dates make Qinghai's broadcaster a product of the great expansion of Chinese provincial television in the 1970s, when stations were established across the country, including in remote western provinces where television had to be built from scratch at altitude.

The satellite chapter began on 1 January 1997, when Qinghai Satellite TV was launched. Satellite carriage took the Xining station national: the channel joined the nationwide provincial satellite network, available on cable systems throughout China, carrying a small plateau province's programmes into big-city homes. The station's later history is dominated by one event — the search for a partner to strengthen the channel, which led, a decade after the satellite launch, to the Hunan partnership described below.

The Hunan partnership

In 2009 Qinghai TV became the subject of one of the most unusual arrangements in Chinese television. Hunan Broadcasting System took a 49 per cent stake in Qinghai TV in 2009, increasing the number of satellite channels in its roster. The background, as reported at the time, was that Qinghai TV had previously been operated under contract arrangements that the regulator, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, ended, proposing instead that another local broadcaster take over. In July 2009 Qinghai TV issued a cooperation invitation to six television media organisations, including Hunan, Shanghai and Guizhou; in a competitive process, Hunan won.

The two sides signed their agreement in October 2009, setting up a joint venture company to operate Qinghai Satellite TV. On 23 November 2009 the regulator approved Qinghai TV Station and Hunan TV Station jointly combining the news channel operation of Qinghai TV. The joint venture, named Green Creative Culture Media, was established with registered capital of ten million yuan, with Qinghai TV Station holding 51 per cent and Hunan Radio and Television Station 49 per cent, and it took responsibility for Qinghai TV's programme production and advertising operations. A Hunan spokesman was careful to note that this was a partnership, not an acquisition: Chinese regulations do not allow one state-owned television station to acquire another. From 1 January 2010 Qinghai TV began broadcasting some of Hunan TV's most popular programmes, Hunan lent producers and well-known hosts to the channel, and a full overhaul of its programming was expected to be completed by May 2010. The arrangement gave the small plateau broadcaster access to the programme-making strength of Hunan Broadcasting System, China's second-biggest state television network after CCTV, whose headquarters are listed in both Changsha and Xining as a result of the partnership.

Channels and language services

Qinghai Television operates a family of four programme services: Qinghai Satellite TV, the flagship; a Qinghai economic life channel; a Qinghai city, or metropolitan, channel, formerly known as the Qinghai Film and Television Variety Channel; and a Qinghai Tibetan-language satellite TV service, known as Ando Satellite TV, which was formerly the Qinghai TV comprehensive channel and Tibetan-language service. The metropolitan channel serves the urban audience of Xining, while the life channel has described its aim as being the channel around the people — a local service built on everyday life in the province.

The network's languages are its most striking feature: QHTV currently broadcasts in Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan and Salar. That four-language range mirrors Qinghai itself. The province's ethnic composition is roughly Han 54 per cent, Tibetan 21 per cent, Hui 16 per cent, Tu 4 per cent, Mongol 1.8 per cent and Salar 1.8 per cent, with more than thirty-seven recognised ethnic groups in a population where minorities make up about half the total. A Tibetan-language satellite service from Xining — Amdo Tibetan is the region's Tibetan variety, reflected in the Ando name — is a service few broadcasters in the world could replicate, and satellite footprints serving China have carried Tibetan-language audio for Qinghai as a named part of the system.

News, entertainment and sport

Qinghai TV offers news coverage, entertainment shows, sports broadcasts and technology updates to its viewers. Its news service reports from Xining on the province — its government, its plateau economy of herding, salt, oil and hydropower, and the life of its prefectures, from Haidong and Haibei to Yushu, Guoluo, Huangnan, Haixi and Hainan. The partnership with Hunan reshaped its entertainment: from the beginning of 2010 the channel carried some of Hunan TV's most popular programmes, and Hunan producers and hosts worked on Qinghai TV, importing the programme-making style of the country's most successful entertainment broadcaster into one of its smallest channels.

The channel's best-documented programme credit in international sources is in sport entertainment: Kunlun Fight. The Chinese kickboxing promotion Kunlun Fight debuted in 2014, holding fourteen events that year from January to December, and its events were broadcast through a television agreement with Qinghai Television; Qinghai TV's own programme listings name Kunlun Fight (2014). The promotion's 70-kilogram world championship tournament that year was won by Dzianis Zuev, and one of its 2014 events, Kunlun Fight 8, was staged in Xining itself, bringing international fighters to the plateau capital. The Kunlun name — taken from the great mountain range that borders Qinghai — made the promotion a natural brand for the channel, and the broadcasts gave Qinghai TV a share in what became one of the world's leading kickboxing properties.

The plateau province on screen

Qinghai's geography gives its broadcaster subjects found nowhere else. The province is China's fourth largest by land area but one of its most sparsely populated, with a 2020 population of 5,923,957. Most of it is mountains and high plateau at an average elevation of some 3,000 metres. In the south the Tanggula Mountains give rise to the Yangtze; the Bayan Har Mountains divide the headwaters of the Yellow River and the Yangtze; and the province is the source of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang rivers, earning it the name of China's Water Tower. Qinghai Lake, in the northeast of the province, is the largest saltwater lake in China, lying on the Roof of the World amid rolling grasslands populated by ethnic Tibetans, and regarded as holy by Tibetans and Mongolians; an international bicycle race runs annually from Xining to the lake.

Culturally, the province is a meeting place. Xining, at an elevation of about 2,261 metres, is the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau, the start of the Qinghai-Tibet railway and a historic hub on the Silk Road and the Tang-Tibetan road, where Han, Hui, Monguor Tu and Tibetan communities coexist. About fifteen miles from the city stands Ta'er Monastery, Kumbum, a centre of Tibetan Buddhism to which thousands of believers make pilgrimages from across the plateau. Listings for the channel note its programming includes plateau and Tibetan-region culture, and that is the unavoidable heart of Qinghai TV: a channel whose home stories are monasteries, nomad grasslands, salt lakes and the sources of Asia's great rivers.

Distribution and reach

Qinghai TV is distributed nationally by satellite and cable. At the time of the Hunan partnership it was reported to air in twenty-four major Chinese markets — a substantial national footprint for a broadcaster from one of China's least populous provinces, and one reason the channel was an attractive partner. Its satellite service, launched in 1997, sits in the nationwide provincial satellite line-up, while its Tibetan-language Ando service extends the broadcaster's reach across the Tibetan plateau region by satellite in its own right.

The broadcaster's official website is qhtv.com, and like other provincial broadcasters it now reaches viewers online as well as by satellite and cable. But the satellite channel remains its defining service: the route by which Xining speaks to the rest of China.

Qinghai TV today

Today Qinghai TV operates from Xining as the satellite flagship of a network founded on 1 January 1971, broadcasting in Chinese, Mongolian, Tibetan and Salar across a four-channel family, in partnership with Hunan Broadcasting System under the joint venture created in 2009. It is a small channel by audience, but an exceptional one by character: the television voice of China's water tower, of Qinghai Lake and the high plateau, and proof that in China's satellite system even the most remote province holds a national channel of its own.