About Qujing Television

Qujing Television

Overview

Qujing Television (Chinese: 曲靖电视台) is the prefecture-level television station of Qujing in eastern Yunnan, operated by the Qujing radio and television broadcaster within the city's converged media centre. Its main channel provides news, livelihood and agricultural programming in Mandarin across the prefecture. Qujing is Yunnan's second city and its gateway to Guizhou and Guangxi — historically the "key to Yunnan and Guizhou" and the "throat of Yunnan" — and its broadcaster serves a large, largely rural prefecture of coal mines, tobacco fields and famous farm produce, from the Xuanwei ham cellars to the rapeseed terraces of Luoping.

The station is a substantial public institution. Its published departmental final accounts record an annual turnover above fifty million yuan, overwhelmingly publicly funded, spent mainly on the culture, tourism, sport and media functions that a prefecture broadcaster exists to perform.

Yunnan's second city and its broadcaster

Qujing's prefecture-level status is comparatively recent: the State Council granted it in 1997, confirming the city as the second-largest economic centre of Yunnan after Kunming. The broadcaster grew with the prefecture it serves — a city-level television station for a territory that is at once an industrial base, a farming heartland and the first city at the source of the Pearl River, whose headwaters rise in its hills.

The agricultural strand in the flagship channel's remit is no formality. Qujing is a coal, tobacco and farming centre, and its counties produce goods known across China. A prefecture newsroom here divides its attention between the pitheads and power economy of its coalfields, the tobacco crop that underpins farm incomes, and the seasonal spectacles — above all Luoping's spring rapeseed bloom — that draw visitors into its countryside.

The station in figures

The published final accounts of Qujing City Radio and Television Station give the clearest available measure of the institution. Total income in the accounts came to 52,216,389 yuan, of which 48,262,266 yuan was general public budget appropriation, 3,300,000 yuan was operating income and 654,123 yuan other income. Total expenditure was 48,943,368 yuan, with 42,540,948 yuan — the great bulk — classified under culture, tourism, sport and media spending, followed by social security and employment, housing security, health and a national defence line, and a year-end carryover of 3,364,536 yuan.

The profile those figures describe is typical of a Chinese prefecture broadcaster and worth reading plainly: a publicly funded cultural institution, earning a modest operating income of its own, whose money goes overwhelmingly on the media service itself. It is the financial skeleton beneath the flagship channel's news, livelihood and agricultural output.

Station and bureau: who runs what

Qujing's broadcasting has the two-part structure standard in China. Alongside the station stands the Qujing City Radio and Television Bureau, the government regulator — a separate body whose own 2025 budget totalled some 6.41 million yuan, almost entirely fiscal appropriation. The bureau administers and regulates; the station broadcasts. The distinction matters for understanding the station's accounts: programme-making sits in the operating institution, while licensing, planning and supervision sit with the bureau.

Both institutions are products of the system created by the "four levels run television" policy adopted at the eleventh national radio and television work conference in 1983, which authorised cities and counties to open their own stations alongside the central and provincial levels. By the end of 1996 China counted 944 television stations and 1,285 cable stations — the dense local broadcasting landscape of which Qujing Television is one prefecture-level part.

The first city at the source of the Pearl River

Qujing styles itself the first city at the source of the Pearl River, the great river of southern China whose headwaters lie in its territory before flowing down through Guangxi and Guangdong to Guangzhou and the sea. The title is a geographical boast with an economic edge: the city sits on the watershed routes between Yunnan, Guizhou and Guangxi, the position that made it the throat of Yunnan on the old roads south and east.

For the television service, the Pearl River source is a recurring environmental and identity story — watershed protection, water supply and the prefecture's place at the head of a river system on which millions downstream depend, reported from the upstream end.

Cuan country: steles and an old road

The prefecture's recorded history is among the oldest in Yunnan. City histories date Weixian County to 135 BC under the Han dynasty, and in 109 BC the Han court created Yizhou Commandery with counties including Wei County, on the site of modern Qilin District, Tonglao in modern Luliang and Cunyan in modern Xuanwei — bringing Qujing formally into the central plains administrative system along the Five-Foot Road, the route that made it a hub of the Southern Silk Road's eastern Yunnan section.

From the third century the region was the heartland of Cuan culture, whose great clans ruled here for more than five hundred years. Its surviving monuments are national treasures of calligraphy: the Cuan Baozi Stele, erected in 405, and the stele of Cuan Longyan. Later ages layered on: the Yuan dynasty made Qujing a route-level administration in 1276; the Ming founded the Qujing military-civil prefecture in 1382 and built its stone city; and Huize's copper mines fed the celebrated "south copper, north transport" trade that carried Yunnan copper to the imperial mints, earning Huize the name of first city of the ten-thousand-li copper transport. Parts of the Red Army passed through the prefecture on the Long March in 1935. Few prefecture stations inherit a documentary brief this deep.

Xuanwei ham, coal and tobacco

Qujing's most famous product is cured in its own Xuanwei: Xuanwei ham, one of China's celebrated hams, is the prefecture's edible emblem, and its production — the salting, fermenting and maturing of legs in Xuanwei's climate — is a staple of the station's agricultural and food coverage. Around it stands the working economy: coal mining and tobacco farming, the twin pillars named in every summary of the prefecture, with the harvests, prices and safety questions that dominate a farming prefecture's news.

Energy and agriculture shape the station's output, as this profile's source record puts it. The flagship channel's agricultural programming serves the counties directly, while its news covers the industrial economy — a dual remit that mirrors the prefecture's own split personality between pit and field.

Luoping's rapeseed spring

Each spring the prefecture produces one of China's most photographed landscapes: the vast rapeseed-flower terraces of Luoping, where seas of yellow bloom around the county's karst cones draw photographers and tourists from across the country. The bloom is a set-piece of the television calendar — aerial pictures, visitor information and the farm economy of the flower fields and their honey and oil.

Seasonal tourism of this kind has changed the prefecture's media rhythm. Alongside the industrial and agricultural year, the station now works to a scenic calendar in which Luoping's spring is the headline act, presenting Qujing to Yunnan and to China as a destination as well as a workplace.

Qujing Television today

Qujing Television today operates within the city's converged media centre, the prefecture's gathered home for broadcast and digital media. Its published accounts show a station funded as a public cultural service, its bureau neighbour handling regulation, and its flagship channel carrying news, livelihood and agricultural programming in Mandarin to Yunnan's second city.

The prefecture it serves is at once a gateway, a coalfield, a tobacco farm and the source of a great river. Its broadcaster's task is to hold those identities together in one schedule — Cuan steles and copper roads in the features, ham and rapeseed in the agricultural strands, and the daily news of a large working prefecture at the throat of Yunnan.