About Suqian Television

Suqian Television

Overview

Suqian Television (Chinese: 宿迁电视台) is the prefecture-level television station of Suqian in northern Jiangsu, operated by the Suqian radio and television broadcaster within the city's converged media centre. Its main channel carries local news, livelihood and public-service programming in Mandarin across the prefecture. Unusually among Chinese prefecture broadcasters, the station is exactly as old as its city: Suqian Television and Suqian People's Radio were both founded in 1996, the year Suqian itself was elevated to prefecture-level status, and the broadcaster's history since then is a compressed history of Chinese local media — merger, group formation, a pioneering mobile service, and finally absorption into a full converged media centre.

Today the television service sits inside the Suqian News Media Centre (Suqian Media Group), formed in January 2025 from the city's newspaper and broadcaster. The television operation itself runs two channels with eighteen self-made programmes, alongside two radio frequencies with twenty-one self-made programmes.

Born with the city: 1996

Suqian's elevation explains the station's birthday. The county was converted into a county-level city in 1987 and raised to prefecture status in 1996, making Suqian the youngest prefecture-level city in Jiangsu. In that founding year the new prefecture created its own broadcasters: Suqian Television Station and Suqian People's Radio both date from 1996, giving the city a voice of its own in place of relayed coverage from its neighbours.

A contemporary profile from the station's first decade gives a snapshot of the young broadcaster at work. It recorded more than 200 in-service employees, over forty percent of them medium- and senior-grade technical personnel, 65 sets of video recording equipment and 26 non-linear editing platforms. The station ran eight television programmes a day totalling nearly 240 minutes, and broadcast for eighteen hours daily — a respectable output for a station serving a prefecture that had not existed ten years earlier.

Merger and group: 2005 to 2010

On 31 January 2005, with the approval of the municipal party committee and municipal government, Suqian People's Radio and Suqian Television were merged to form the Suqian Radio and Television Corporation — a prefecture-level public institution directly under the municipal government. The merger followed the pattern then sweeping Chinese local broadcasting, uniting radio and television gathering, production and transmission in a single house.

The corporate form deepened five years later. On 12 July 2010 the Suqian Broadcasting Group was formally inaugurated alongside the station, adding a group structure to the public institution. Through both changes the call signs endured: television continued to broadcast as Suqian Television, the name under which this profile is published, within the combined radio and television operation.

Two television channels and a full programme slate

The corporation's television service comprises two channels — a news comprehensive channel and a public channel — carrying eighteen self-made television programmes between them. The comprehensive channel is the flagship: the service described in this profile's source record as providing local news, livelihood and public-service programming in Mandarin for the whole prefecture, which administers counties and districts from the urban core at Sucheng and Suyu to Shuyang, Siyang and Sihong around Hongze Lake and Luoma Lake.

Eighteen self-made programmes is a substantial slate for a prefecture of Suqian's size, and it is matched on radio, where the corporation's two frequencies carry twenty-one self-made programmes of their own. Between television and radio the broadcaster thus maintains nearly forty locally originated programme titles — the production base on which its later mobile and converged-media ventures were built.

Named programmes on the comprehensive channel

The flagship channel's named programmes show the range of a prefecture newsroom. Its news offer is headed by Suqian News, the station's bulletin of record. Around it sit Chufeng Yehua, a night-time talk programme whose title invokes the Chu wind — a nod to Suqian's identity as the hometown of Xiang Yu, the Chu hegemon-king of the Qin-Han transition — and Shitou Liaoliangju, an informal commentary slot. Suqian Finance covers the prefecture's economy; Today Suqian Development Zone reports on the city's development zone; and Zhengwu Shikong, "government affairs time and space", handles public administration and services.

The mix is characteristic of Chinese prefecture television: a hard-news core, a talk format with strong local colouring, and service strands that connect viewers to finance, development policy and government business. For a city created only in 1996, the programmes also do identity work, rehearsing what Suqian is — Chu heritage, lakes, liquor and new industry — for an audience many of whom arrived with the city itself.

The public channel

The second channel, the public channel, leans toward lifestyle and service television. Its named programmes include Jingcai Suqian ("Wonderful Suqian"), a magazine treatment of the city itself; Zouqi Xin Shenghuo, a new-life lifestyle strand; Baobei Jihua ("Baby Plan"), aimed at parents and young children; and Ai Shang Che, a motoring programme whose title puns on loving cars. The channel complements the flagship's news-and-affairs weight with the consumer, family and leisure content that fills a prefecture schedule.

Radio: FM 92.1 and FM 101.9

Television's sister services are two FM frequencies. News Comprehensive Radio broadcasts on FM 92.1 as the radio counterpart of the television flagship, while Traffic Music Radio occupies FM 101.9, serving drivers across a prefecture whose road network has been rebuilt since 1996. Together the two frequencies carry the twenty-one self-made radio programmes recorded for the corporation — news, service and music formats that reach the county towns and lake districts beyond the cable footprint.

Suqian Mobile TV and the converged-media turn

Suqian's broadcaster made its national reputation in new media. Suqian Mobile TV was prepared from June 2015 by a dedicated new-media team of editors, marketers and technicians, and officially launched on 18 September 2015. Its reported figures were striking for a prefecture service: more than 74 million visits, over 600,000 registered users and more than 100,000 daily active users, placing it at the front of China's city and county mobile television services and earning national titles for influence, comprehensive strength, brand value and new-media teamwork.

The mobile service became the corporation's fusion laboratory. It carried live graphic coverage of events such as the 2016 Suqian torrential rain, and by 2018 the station had drawn up twenty-seven concrete convergence projects — a prototype converged-media centre, mobile-first publishing rules, platform building and a comprehensive propagation assessment system among them. The lesson the station drew, that the phone screen comes first, anticipated the structure it would finally adopt in 2025.

The 2025 media centre and the city it serves

On 25 January 2025 the Suqian News Media Centre (Suqian Media Group) was inaugurated, formed by integrating the former Suqian Daily Press with the Suqian Radio and Television Corporation. Television, radio, newspaper and mobile services now sit in one converged institution — the end point of the sequence that began with two separate 1996 stations.

The city on screen remains the one in the station's founding brief. Suqian stands between Hongze Lake and Luoma Lake in northern Jiangsu, bordering Xuzhou to the northwest, Lianyungang to the northeast, Huai'an to the south and Anhui to the west. It markets itself through Xiang Yu's Chu heritage, through the celebrated Yanghe and Shuanggou baijiu distilled in its counties, and through the e-commerce villages that have made its rural economy a national story. Lakes ecology, liquor and rural e-commerce feature in its output — the subjects of a young prefecture still introducing itself, covered by a station that has grown up alongside it.