About Southern People Weekly

Southern People Weekly

Southern People Weekly, known in Chinese as Nanfang Renwu Zhoukan, is a Chinese magazine published in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, by the Southern Media Group. Founded in 2004, it is a feature magazine devoted to people: it publishes long-form profiles and interviews with prominent personalities in politics, business, culture and society, and it has become one of China's flagship platforms for non-fiction journalism. Where its sister publications in the Southern group are known for daily news and investigative reporting, Southern People Weekly built its identity around the human story — the idea that the changes sweeping China can best be understood through the lives of the individuals experiencing them. A 2025 academic study of Chinese non-fiction journalism, based on hundreds of its articles, described it as a leading and active platform for the genre and as a pioneer of Chinese non-fiction writing.

Founding by the Southern Media Group in 2004

Southern People Weekly was founded in 2004 by the Canton-based Southern Media Group — "Canton" being the older English name for Guangzhou. The group also produces a series of other well-known publications, including the Southern Metropolitan Daily and Southern Weekly, the influential weekly newspaper. The new magazine was launched into what participants later remembered as a buoyant period for Chinese journalism: new titles were appearing, journalists moved between outlets, and the Southern group's publications were at the centre of the country's most ambitious reporting. Southern People Weekly's founding proposition was distinct from that of its sisters. It would not chase breaking news or official announcements. It would specialise in human-interest and people-centred stories, telling the news through profiles of the people making it.

A Magazine Built Around Personalities

The magazine's focus is stated plainly in its name: renwu means "personages" or "personalities." Its journalism consists of long-form profiles and interviews with figures in politics, business, culture and society. United States diplomatic reporting in 2006 described it in exactly those terms, as a Guangdong magazine covering prominent personalities, and that description has remained accurate. The profile form allows the magazine to approach subjects that are difficult to address head-on: a career, a controversy or a turning point in public life can be examined through one person's experience, in depth and at length. This people-first method later made the magazine a natural home for the narrative non-fiction that became a major genre in Chinese media in the following decade.

The 2004 "50 Public Intellectuals" Issue

The magazine announced its ambitions almost immediately. In September 2004, in only its seventh issue, Southern People Weekly published a series of reports under the title "50 Public Intellectuals Who Influence China." The list ranged across China's intellectual life and included the economist Mao Yushi, who was named by the magazine that year as one of China's 50 most distinguished intellectuals; the scholar Yang Dongping, known for his work on education reform and equity; and Wang Yi, then a legal scholar and writer. The feature was widely cited for years afterwards — inclusion in the list became a standard line in the biographies of the people named — and it established the magazine's franchise: using the device of the named individual to map the forces shaping Chinese society. Few seventh issues of any magazine achieve that kind of afterlife.

Testing the Limits: The Panchen Lama Story

Profiling prominent personalities in China carries risks when the personalities are politically sensitive, and the magazine encountered them early. A United States diplomatic cable of June 2006, reporting conversations with Guangdong media officials, recorded that propaganda authorities had ordered an investigative report severely criticising Southern People Weekly — referred to in the cable as "Southern Weekly on Prominent Personalities" — for running a piece on the daughter of the 10th Panchen Lama, one of the most sensitive figures in Chinese religious and Tibetan affairs. According to the account given to the diplomats, the magazine was criticised for violating media rules on a "core" issue and might be shut down as a result. The magazine survived the episode, but the incident illustrates the narrow path its format required it to walk: people-centred journalism could reach subjects that straight news coverage could not, yet it remained subject to the same red lines.

Circulation and Reach

By the standards of Chinese feature magazines, Southern People Weekly became a substantial commercial success. According to the figures cited in the 2025 study of its non-fiction journalism, its circulation in its peak year in the 2010s reached over one million copies, and it currently sells around 760,000 copies per issue across nearly 50 cities — a sale described as higher than that of most feature magazines in China. Those numbers reflect the scale its weekly rhythm sustains: the study's researchers, working through the magazine's own digital archive, counted 360 issues published over the eight years from 2015 to 2023, an average of approximately 45 issues a year. A weekly profile magazine selling hundreds of thousands of copies per issue in dozens of cities is a mass-market product, not a niche literary journal, and that scale underwrote its influence.

Pioneer of Chinese Non-Fiction Journalism

The magazine's most distinctive later role has been in the rise of non-fiction journalism in China. The genre's prevalence dates from around 2010, when the official magazine People's Literature debuted a non-fiction column inviting contributions centred on people's authentic lives. In 2015, Southern People Weekly initiated the establishment of a "Chinese non-fiction creation alliance," joining with seven other media outlets — eight in total, including Tencent's Guyu platform and Dandu — to promote the genre. Scholars credit that step with solidifying its status as a pioneer of Chinese non-fiction journalism. Within a few years, non-fiction had become a buzzword in Chinese media and public discourse, and full-length books and films adapted from non-fiction journalism became popular — a development in which the magazine's long-standing profile practice positioned it as a flagship platform.

Authenticity as an Editorial Method

Academic study of the magazine has focused on how its journalists construct authenticity. The 2025 study, published in the journal Media, analysed 348 articles drawn from Southern People Weekly — principally the cover stories of its issues from 2015 to 2023 — and examined how its writers use voice and visibility: whose voices are heard in a story, and how openly the reporter appears within it. The study situates the magazine in a Chinese storytelling tradition running from the reportage literature of the 1930s through the "feature" journalism that became dominant in the 1990s as Chinese media commercialised — features that focused on the stories of ordinary people previously overlooked, portrayed in a personal and emotionally charged manner. Southern People Weekly, in this account, represents the mature form of that tradition: a commercial weekly whose authority rests on rendering real lives accurately and vividly rather than on detached, wire-style objectivity.

The Southern Media Stable

Southern People Weekly cannot be separated from the group that publishes it. The Southern Media Group, based in Guangzhou and rooted in the Nanfang Daily organisation, produced the Southern Metropolitan Daily, one of China's most commercially successful city newspapers, and Southern Weekly, the newspaper that from the 1990s to the early 2010s was renowned for investigative journalism and influence among intellectual readers. The magazine drew on the group's reporting resources and its reputation, while occupying the people-and-features corner of the portfolio. For readers, the "Southern" brand itself signalled a style of journalism — commercially driven, professionally ambitious and oriented toward China's changing society — and the magazine's profiles carried that brand into territory, including the lives of senior public figures, that even its sister papers approached cautiously.

Digital Archive and Continuing Publication

The magazine continues to publish on a weekly cycle, and its back catalogue has become a research resource in its own right: the scholars who studied its non-fiction worked through all of its issues in its proprietary digital archive, extracting the cover stories of 360 issues across eight years. That archive is evidence of a second life for print journalism of this kind — as a documented record of how China portrayed its prominent personalities, and its ordinary people, across two decades of rapid change. The magazine's digital presence extends the reach of its print edition, whose per-issue sale across nearly 50 cities remains, by the most recent scholarly account, higher than that of most comparable Chinese feature magazines.

Significance

Southern People Weekly matters for three reasons. It demonstrated, from its seventh issue onward, that the profile — the named individual, examined at length — could be the organising device of a major Chinese news magazine. It showed that people-centred journalism could achieve mass circulation, passing a million copies at its peak while sustaining a weekly schedule over decades. And it carried that practice into the non-fiction era, helping to found the 2015 alliance that promoted the genre across Chinese media and becoming the case study through which scholars explain how Chinese journalists construct authenticity. Founded in Guangzhou in 2004 as the Southern group's magazine of personalities, it remains the clearest example of the form it pioneered.