About Reference News

Reference News

Reference News, in Chinese Cankao Xiaoxi, is a Chinese daily newspaper published in Beijing by Xinhua News Agency, China's official state news agency. First published on 7 November 1931, it is one of China's oldest newspapers and, by the measures most often cited, its largest: in the mid-2010s it was ranked seventh in the world by circulation and first in China. Its distinctive product is not original reporting but translation — Xinhua selects articles from the world's major news agencies and news journals, translates them into Chinese, and republishes them for Chinese readers. Its website is cankaoxiaoxi.com, and alongside the main Chinese edition it has been published in Uyghur, Kazakh, Korean and Mongolian editions for ethnic minority groups in China.

Founding in Ruijin in 1931

Reference News was first published on 7 November 1931. That date is also the founding date of its publisher: Xinhua began in November 1931 as the Red China News Agency in Ruijin, Jiangxi province, in the Chinese Soviet Zone, and Reference News was the bulletin through which the young agency circulated outside reporting to Communist Party and army officials. Historical accounts of Xinhua record that in its early days the agency used army radio to collect outside news, mainly dispatches of the Nationalist government's Central News Agency, and that these were edited and printed in Reference News, which was distributed to Party leaders. The early editions of the newspaper were published under different titles in Ruijin until it was renamed Reference News in 1942, according to the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture entry on the paper. By the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Xinhua's Reference News was translating not only Central News Agency news but also international news from agencies such as TASS and Havas.

A window on the outside world

For roughly its first five decades, Reference News had a role no other Chinese publication could claim: before the 1980s, it was the only official channel for the Chinese public to have a glimpse of the outside world. In a media system where foreign newspapers were not freely available, a daily digest of translated foreign reporting — however carefully selected — was the authorised route by which Chinese readers could see how the rest of the world reported events, including events in China itself. Academic studies underline the paper's privileged position: research on its WeChat presence notes that it stood out from comparable outlets by holding exclusive rights to publish translated news stories from sources outside the Chinese mainland, which partly explains its popularity among Chinese readers.

That privilege came with strict limits on who could read it. Reference News was at first available only to cadres and their families. It belonged to Xinhua's layered internal information system, in which publications were distributed according to rank; reference accounts describe translated foreign reporting being delivered by Xinhua personnel, rather than through the national mail system, to officials at working level and above, while separate, shorter internal reports went to ministerial level and higher. Reference News sat at the broadest end of that classified system — widely circulated inside the apparatus, but still an internal publication rather than a newspaper any citizen could buy.

From internal bulletin to public newspaper

The paper's modern history turns on its opening to the general public. Reference accounts record that it was made available to the entire Chinese public after competition from other news sources had started, and specifically that on 2 January 1985 Reference News was approved to cancel its internal publication designation and switched to public distribution. The effect on its numbers was dramatic. With its monopoly broken by the expanding Chinese press of the reform era, its circulation dropped from 11 million in 1980 to 4 million in 1985. Even after that fall, it remained an exceptionally large newspaper, and its transition captures a wider story in Chinese media: a publication created for a closed information hierarchy adapting, successfully, to a commercial market in which readers could choose among many titles.

Circulation and standing

By every published ranking, Reference News has stood at or near the top of Chinese newspaper circulation for decades. The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers' World Press Trends 2016 placed it seventh in the world and first in China in the mid-2010s. Chinese industry figures tell the same story over time: a 2011 top-ten list put Reference News first among Chinese dailies with a circulation of 3.25 million, ahead of the People's Daily at 2.52 million; and the Chinese Journalism Development Report, citing official statistics released in August 2014, recorded an average circulation of 2,884,700 per issue for Reference News in 2013, close behind the People's Daily's 3,143,200 that year. Older reference summaries describe it simply as the daily with the largest circulation in mainland China, at about three million. Academic work published in 2025 likewise states that Reference News has long held the position of the newspaper with the largest circulation in China, maintaining its popularity despite rapid changes in the country's journalistic landscape since the 1970s.

How the paper is made

The editorial model is selection and translation. As China's official news agency, Xinhua carefully selects articles from the world's major news agencies and journals and translates them into Chinese; other descriptions of the paper note that its items are selected and translated by editors and correspondents based in Beijing, and that it also publishes original reporting and analysis by its own staff. The result is a curated picture of foreign coverage: Chinese readers see world events through foreign bylines, but only through the items Xinhua's editors choose to carry. Scholars of translation have studied exactly that gatekeeping — how the selection of topics and the framing of translated comments shape the image of foreign countries, and of China itself, presented to domestic readers. One study of the paper's output notes that its translated coverage of the United States, for example, reflects both its government affiliation and the changing perceptions of its Chinese readership.

Editions in minority languages

Beyond its main Chinese edition, Reference News is also published in the Uyghur, Kazakh, Korean and Mongolian languages for ethnic minority groups in China, according to its publisher's descriptions reproduced in reference works. Those editions extend the same model — translated world reporting selected in Beijing — to readers in the languages of China's border and minority regions, and they form part of the paper's claim to a genuinely national circulation rather than a purely metropolitan one.

Digital presence and WeChat

The paper's official website is cankaoxiaoxi.com, and it also operates a mobile app presence, but its most studied digital success is on WeChat. When WeChat subscription accounts launched in 2012, Reference News responded quickly and became one of the most successful WeChat accounts, according to research by Zeng and Li published in the journal Perspectives. Its followers, by the paper's own account as cited in that research, include many young readers from teenagers to young adults, distributed across China's wealthiest provinces and cities, including Guangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong and Beijing. The same body of research notes that the followers of its WeChat accounts largely do not overlap with the subscribers of its printed newspaper, and that some content — notably reports quoting foreign netizens' comments on China-related topics — is prepared exclusively for its WeChat followers, with a dataset study of August 2019 to July 2020 finding that such reports tended to cover softer news and to quote positive comments towards China. A follow-up study in Journalism Studies in 2025 examined the same WeChat strategy, describing how translated reporting is adapted for a marketised, digitalised and competitive social media environment.

Place in China's media system

Reference News endures because its original function still matters. It was created in 1931 so that Communist leaders in a blockaded soviet could read what the outside world was saying; it spent half a century as the sole authorised window on foreign reporting; it survived the loss of that monopoly in 1985 and the collapse of its 11-million circulation peak to remain, on the most recent rankings available, China's most widely circulated newspaper and one of the ten largest in the world. Its publisher remains Xinhua News Agency — a ministry-level institution subordinate to the State Council, described as the largest news agency in the world in terms of correspondents worldwide — and its pages still perform the same task in public that they once performed in secret: telling Chinese readers, in Chinese, what foreign news organisations are reporting, in a selection made in Beijing. For researchers, translators and anyone trying to understand how world news reaches a Chinese audience, there is no closer vantage point than this newspaper.