About Sanlian Lifeweek

Sanlian Lifeweek

Overview

Sanlian Lifeweek, known in Chinese as Sanlian Shenghuo Zhoukan, is a weekly news and culture magazine based in Chaoyang, Beijing, China, known for its in-depth reporting and cultural commentary. It is published under the China Publishing Group Corporation, through the Sanlian publishing house founded by SDX Joint Publishing Company, and appears in simplified Chinese. Its stated motto, also rendered as its slogan, is "a magazine and the lifestyle it advocates" — in Chinese, "a magazine and the life it advocates." The magazine is aimed particularly at middle-class readers, combining current-affairs reporting with coverage of culture, ideas and everyday life. Its official website is lifeweek.com.cn, and its ISSN is 1005-3603. A Portuguese foreign-ministry interview note in 2013 described it as one of the most widely circulated weekly magazines in China, with 300,000 readers per week in more than 30 large Chinese cities, while the magazine's reference listings give a circulation figure of 820 thousand.

Founding and the Zou Taofen Inheritance

Sanlian Lifeweek was founded in 1993 by SDX Joint Publishing Company in Beijing. It released a pilot issue in December 1994, and its first regular issue appeared on 14 January 1995 — a date noted as the 100th anniversary of Zou Taofen's birth. That choice of date was deliberate symbolism: the magazine positioned itself as a continuation of the Life magazine founded by Zou Taofen in 1926. Zou was one of modern China's most famous publisher-journalists, and the Sanlian name itself descends from the Sanlian Bookstore tradition associated with his publishing world — the Life, Reading and New Knowledge bookstore whose general manager in the reform era, Shen Changwen, also edited the influential journal Reading (Dushu). By claiming Zou's Life as its ancestor, the new magazine presented itself from the start not as a disposable news product but as a revival of a respected Chinese tradition of the journalist as cultural guide.

First Editors and the Cultural Criticism Years, 1995–2000

The magazine's first editor-in-chief was Qian Gang, with Yang Lang serving as deputy editor. In September 1995, Zhu Wei — formerly of Rural Women magazine — joined Sanlian Lifeweek as editor-in-chief, beginning a tenure that would last nineteen years. Starting in 1996, the magazine was published biweekly. The focus during this first period was cultural criticism: covering all aspects of everyday life and offering commentary on current affairs from a cultural perspective. Notable features of the era included the writer Wang Xiaobo's column "Late-Born Chats" and the book review section "Bestsellers and Rankings." This formula — long essays, book culture, urban life observed closely — established the readership that the magazine would carry into its news era: educated urban readers who wanted a weekly that treated their changing daily lives as a serious subject.

Becoming a News Weekly, 2001–2004

In 2001, after the 11 September attacks, Sanlian Lifeweek transitioned into a weekly publication with a growing emphasis on news reporting. It launched timely and in-depth series, including five consecutive issues on the 9/11 attacks — a striking commitment of a Chinese weekly's cover to a foreign event and its consequences. The same period brought investigative reporting on Chinese officialdom, including reports titled "Corrupt Official Li Jizhou," "The Guangxi Corruption Network" and "The Power Circle of Corrupt Officials in Hebei." The shift changed the magazine's centre of gravity: cultural criticism remained, but it was now attached to a newsroom that chased the week's events with cover packages. Media histories of the period describe Sanlian Lifeweek in this era as looking like Time or Newsweek and becoming one of China's most influential news and opinion magazines.

A Broader Comprehensive Magazine, 2005–2009

From the middle of the 2000s, the magazine evolved from a news-focused weekly into a more comprehensive publication with a broader scope. In 2005 it ran a series revisiting historical details to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. In 2006 it produced a cultural geography series following the opening of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, the engineering project that linked Tibet by rail to the rest of China. These projects show the magazine's characteristic method: take a news peg — an anniversary, an infrastructure opening — and expand it into history, geography and culture. The magazine's covers in this period ranged across contemporary art and society as well; a 2006 issue carried reporting from New York on Chinese contemporary art's arrival at international auctions, following Sotheby's March 2006 Contemporary Art Asia sale where Zhang Xiaogang's Bloodline Series set records. The result was a weekly that readers could approach either as news or as a cultural journal.

The Zhu Wei Era and Editorial Continuity

Editorial continuity is one of Sanlian Lifeweek's defining features. Zhu Wei served as editor-in-chief from September 1995 until late 2014 — nineteen years, spanning the biweekly cultural magazine, the post-2001 news weekly and the comprehensive magazine that followed. In late 2014 Zhu stepped down and was succeeded by Li Honggu, who is listed as the magazine's editor-in-chief in its reference entries. Such long tenures are part of the magazine's identity: the founding team of Qian Gang and Yang Lang set the cultural frame, Zhu Wei built the modern weekly, and Li Honggu's tenure has been associated with the digital transformation described below. Reporting on the magazine has not all been celebratory about its room to manoeuvre: a 2007 Radio Free Asia report, carried in international coverage of pressure on Chinese magazines, said Lifeweek had been ordered to stay off current-affairs topics after publishing on politically sensitive subjects including the Cultural Revolution and the Tangshan earthquake — a reminder of the constraints under which even established Beijing weeklies operate.

Notable Coverage: The Bo Guagua Cover Story

One of the magazine's most discussed modern cover stories appeared in January 2014, when it published a 31-page cover story on Bo Guagua, written by Li Jing with the aid of Bo family confidant and Taiwanese-American businessman Larry Cheng. Bo Guagua is the son of Bo Xilai, the fallen senior politician, and the story was a rare long-form account from inside the family's circle. The report included the exclusive claim that John Garnaut, the Beijing reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, had acted as Wang Lijun's interpreter when Wang defected to the United States Consulate in Chengdu — the episode that triggered Bo Xilai's downfall. That detail was questioned by other media, and The New York Times reported on the dispute. The episode captures both the magazine's ambition — devoting 31 pages to the most sensitive political story of its moment — and the scrutiny its claims attract.

Digital Transformation

In 2017, Sanlian Lifeweek carried out a digital media transformation. By 2022, the new media revenue of the magazine accounted for 80 percent of its revenue, according to reporting on editor Li Honggu's account of the changes — a figure that shows how completely the economics of a Chinese print weekly had inverted within a generation. The magazine's web presence is centred on lifeweek.com.cn, and its digital output extends the print formula of in-depth reporting and cultural commentary into faster online formats. The transformation also distinguishes Sanlian Lifeweek from many Chinese magazines of its founding generation that remained dependent on print advertising and newsstand sales. For readers, the practical consequence is that much of the magazine's contemporary output is encountered online first, with the weekly print issue serving as the curated flagship rather than the only product.

Readership and Position Among Chinese Weeklies

Sanlian Lifeweek's readership has been described in terms of China's urban middle class: readers in more than 30 large Chinese cities, in the 2013 account, drawn by in-depth reporting and cultural commentary rather than by breaking news speed. Its stated ambition, captured in its motto, is to advocate a lifestyle as much as to report one — the magazine as a guide to how its readers might live, read, travel and think. That positioning places it between China's harder news weeklies, such as the finance-focused titles, and its purely cultural journals, such as its sister Sanlian publication Dushu. The Sanlian imprint matters here: the same publishing tradition that produced Dushu, the monthly that introduced Western philosophy to reform-era readers, also produced this weekly, and the two share an assumption that general readers want ideas treated seriously.

Sanlian Lifeweek Today

Today Sanlian Lifeweek is a weekly magazine from Beijing, published in simplified Chinese under China Publishing Group Corporation, edited by Li Honggu, and read in print and through its digital channels at lifeweek.com.cn. Its archive falls naturally into the periods its own history suggests: the cultural-criticism biweekly of 1995 to 2000, with Wang Xiaobo's column and its bestseller rankings; the news weekly built after 2001, with its five-issue 9/11 package and anti-corruption investigations; the comprehensive magazine of the later 2000s, with its Second World War anniversary and Qinghai-Tibet Railway series; and the digitally transformed title of recent years, in which new media supply most revenue. For anyone researching Chinese media, it is one of the essential Beijing weeklies — a magazine that began by invoking a 1926 ancestor and became, in its own right, a chronicler of China's changing urban life.