About The Economic Observer

The Economic Observer

Overview

The Economic Observer, known in Chinese as Jingji Guancha Bao, is a weekly Chinese-language newspaper published in China since April 2001. It is regarded as one of the top three economic-focused newspapers in China and is well regarded for its in-depth special features and informed commentary. The entry that prompted this profile described it as a classical liberal weekly with an English-edition website, privately owned in later years, and focused on economic and public affairs. Its own English-language site describes it as an independent Chinese weekly newspaper that publishes news and commentary related to China's economic, political and social developments, covering business, economics, finance, law, politics and social issues.

That breadth is the first thing to understand about the paper. Although its name promises economics, the Economic Observer has never confined itself to markets and company results. From its beginnings it reported on socioeconomic and political events alongside business news, and its reputation rests as much on long special features and comment pages as on financial reporting. For readers outside China, it became one of the Chinese newspapers most often noticed by international news organisations: its own site has noted that it is often listed as an original source by Bloomberg, Reuters and other international news wire services in stories discussing rumours of imminent changes to Chinese policy or other unconfirmed reports that might affect markets in the region.

Founding and first issues

The Economic Observer was founded in August 2000 and began as a small news publication dedicated to supporting China's market liberalisation and reporting on socioeconomic and political events with a stated commitment to journalistic integrity. Its first issue was published in April 2001 and ran to 24 pages. That modest beginning matters because of how quickly the paper grew in ambition and size. By December 2006 the newspaper had expanded to 56 pages. Its own history adds that in 2011 it expanded again, to a 60-page format. A weekly that began at 24 pages and more than doubled its pagination within its first decade was clearly finding both readers and advertisers in China's rapidly commercialising newspaper market of the 2000s.

The timing of the launch is also significant. The paper appeared at the start of a decade in which business journalism became one of the most competitive fields in Chinese publishing. Market research on China's financial newspapers later ranked the Economic Observer among the country's five main financial newspapers, alongside the 21st Century Business Herald, China Business News, China Times and the China Business Journal. To be placed in that company within little more than a decade of a 24-page launch illustrates how completely the weekly established itself in its chosen field.

The Sanlian relaunch and ownership

The paper's own account of its history explains that in 2001 the Sanlian Group, a Shandong provincial government holding company specialising in selling electrical appliances — and not affiliated with the similarly named Sanlian media companies — took control of the paper and relaunched it as a national business-oriented weekly. Reference accounts likewise record that the original investment for the newspaper came from the Sanlian Group, described as a diversified state-invested company based in Shandong province.

Ownership later changed in a way that set the paper apart from most Chinese newspapers. In May 2010, Xinhua Sports and Entertainment Limited sold the advertising rights and the distribution rights of the paper to a private buyer, Lu Zhiqiang, described in reporting as a real estate billionaire. Accounts of the paper record that Lu Zhiqiang subsequently had full control of the Economic Observer. That private control is consistent with the description in the source list for this profile, which classified the paper as privately owned — an unusual status in a Chinese press system in which newspapers have generally been produced by government or Party-affiliated sponsors, and one that helps explain why outside observers so often singled the paper out for its independent editorial stance.

Beijing newsroom, Jinan registration

One of the paper's best-known quirks is the geography of its operation. Although its editorial offices are based in Beijing, the newspaper is officially registered in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province. Its own site confirms both halves of that arrangement: the editorial operation sits in the capital, while the registration sits in Jinan, and the paper maintains bureaus scattered throughout the country. The Shandong connection follows naturally from its founding investment and its 2001 relaunch under the Shandong-based Sanlian Group, while the Beijing base puts its journalists in the city where national economic policy is made and announced.

The paper's English site has given a Beijing address for the Economic Observer Online — Building 7A, Xinghua Dongli, in Dongcheng District, Beijing. That combination of a Beijing newsroom, a Shandong registration and bureaus around the country is a useful reminder that a Chinese newspaper's place of registration, its ownership history and its working newsroom do not always sit in the same city, even for a title that readers naturally associate with the capital.

Format, sections and slogan

The Economic Observer is distributed on Saturday mornings, although the official publication date printed on the paper is the following Monday. Reference accounts describe each issue as 56 pages selling for 5 Chinese yuan or 10 Hong Kong dollars, figures that belong to the period those accounts describe, before the paper's own history records the later expansion to 60 pages in 2011. About 300,000 copies of the newspaper were distributed throughout China's first-tier cities each week, according to the paper's own advertising information.

The paper features seven regular sections: News, Nation, Market, Corporation, Automobile/Property, Observer, and Lifestyle/Business Review. The structure shows the balance the weekly tries to strike — hard news and national affairs first, markets and companies at the centre, property and automobiles as major consumer and business beats, and then the Observer and review sections where its commentary and longer writing live. Its slogan is "rationality and constructiveness" — in Chinese, lixing, jianshexing. Those two words became a shorthand for the paper's editorial identity: critical and reform-minded in its reporting, but presenting itself as rational and constructive rather than oppositional for its own sake.

Inspired by the Financial Times

Inspired by the British Financial Times, the Economic Observer has, since September 2001, been printed on salmon- or peach-coloured paper. The choice was a deliberate piece of signalling in the paper's first year of publication. The Financial Times was internationally recognised by its coloured stock, and a new Chinese business weekly adopting a similar appearance announced, before a reader reached a single headline, that it aspired to be read as a serious financial newspaper in that tradition. The coloured paper also made the weekly instantly distinguishable on crowded Chinese newsstands, where it competed with daily business papers as well as general newspapers.

The influence was presentational rather than structural — the Economic Observer is a weekly, not a daily, and its seven-section structure and 56- and later 60-page issues are built for weekend reading and longer features rather than for the daily cycle of market news. Even so, the salmon paper remains one of the most frequently repeated facts about the title in reference accounts, precisely because it communicated the paper's ambition so economically.

Editorial stance and reputation

The Economic Observer is considered to take a noticeably independent approach to reporting the news in China, and it has a reputation for being pro-business and in favour of the continuation of market reforms. That reputation was present from the start: the paper began, by its own history's account, dedicated to supporting China's market liberalisation. Its well-regarded special features and commentary gave that stance a distinctive form — long, reported pieces and argued comment rather than short market briefs alone.

International attention reinforced the reputation. As noted above, Bloomberg, Reuters and other international wire services have listed the paper as an original source on stories about possible changes to Chinese policy. For a weekly newspaper, being treated as a source worth citing by global financial wires is a measure of how closely its reporting on economic policy was followed, both inside China and by market watchers outside it. Inside China, market research on financial newspapers placed it first among financial newspapers in some city rankings of the early 2010s, with a market share figure of 29 percent cited for Shanghai in one such study — a reminder that its readership was concentrated in exactly the major commercial cities where its weekly distribution was focused.

The Copenhagen and hukou editorials

Two editorial episodes show how the paper used its comment pages in ways that reached far beyond its own readership. On 7 December 2009, the Economic Observer was one of only two Chinese newspapers to publish a common editorial with 55 other newspapers around the world calling for action from the world leaders gathering in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate change summit. The idea for the common editorial was hatched by the British newspaper The Guardian. For a Chinese weekly to join a simultaneous global editorial was unusual, and the experience appears to have shaped what happened next.

In March 2010, the Economic Observer published an editorial calling on representatives of China's legislature to adopt reforms to the country's household registration — hukou — system. The editorial was headlined "Request for Representatives at the Two Meetings to Hasten Reform of the Household Registration System." In an unprecedented move, it was simultaneously published by 13 other Chinese newspapers. A report in The New York Times said that one of the editors involved, Zhang Hong, deputy editor of the Economic Observer Online, was removed from his position as punishment for his role in publishing the editorial. According to the Wall Street Journal's China Real Time blog, Zhang Hong had hatched the plan to publish an editorial in collaboration with other media outlets after taking part in the Guardian's Copenhagen editorial the previous year. The episode is central to the paper's history: it showed both the reach of its constructive-reform agenda — hukou reform went to the heart of how Chinese citizens could move and settle — and the professional cost that such coordinated commentary could carry.

The Wenzhou train crash and the railways report

On 30 July 2011, a week after 40 people were killed in a high-speed train collision near Wenzhou, the newspaper ignored a government censorship directive to publish an eight-page feature on the crash. The front-page story was presented as a letter to two-year-old survivor Xiang Weiyi, whose parents were killed. It described two images of China — one blossoming in the midst of the people, the other hidden in officialdom — and pledged "to advocate and act" for the people's rights. The decision to publish, and the form the paper chose — a letter to an orphaned child rather than a conventional news report — made the issue one of the most discussed in the paper's history and a defining example of the independent approach attributed to it.

The paper's railway coverage also brought it into conflict of a different kind the following year. It was fined and issued a warning over an inaccurate report published in June 2012 that said the Ministry of Railways might be reformed. Authorities revoked the press pass of the reporter who wrote the story. The article had claimed that the ministry might lose control of investment, construction and railway operations, and that it would establish and inject assets into three new companies to be overseen by the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission. Reporting both episodes together gives a balanced picture: a paper willing to defy a directive after the Wenzhou crash, and a paper that was also sanctioned when its reporting on the same ministry proved inaccurate.

Digital presence and the English edition

The newspaper's website is eeo.com.cn. The Economic Observer Online was relaunched in March 2007 and offered subscribers access to all the newspaper's content, although most articles from each week's newspaper also appeared on the website at no charge, along with web-only content including commentary and op-ed pieces from guest columnists. The paper's English-language website featured select translations from the weekly newspaper and the website, and also published original reporting and interviews. The English edition was relaunched on 1 March 2007 as part of the same online relaunch.

The English operation had a defined lifespan. The paper announced that the Economic Observer's English website ceased operations on 25 October 2013; the site would no longer be updated but would remain accessible. By then, according to the paper's own guide to the site, the English-language website had been publishing content since February 2007, had posted more than 7,000 articles in more than six and a half years — most of them translations of important articles that appeared in the newspaper — and had published a weekly wrap of the contents of each week's newspaper for almost seven years, covering roughly 300 issues of the paper since July 2007. In September of its final period, the site had also launched the Economic Observer Podcast, which later reformatted into a programme called China Hang-up. The Chinese-language newspaper and its Chinese digital operation continued after the English site closed; it was the English edition, specifically, that ended in 2013.

Place in China's newspaper landscape

The Economic Observer occupies a distinctive place among Chinese newspapers. It is a national weekly rather than a daily, an economics paper that reports politics and society, a Beijing-edited title registered in Jinan, and a paper whose ownership passed from a Shandong state-invested group to private control. Reference works list it among China's national newspapers and among its leading financial titles, and the description behind this profile called it a classical liberal weekly — a label that aligns with the pro-business, pro-market-reform reputation recorded elsewhere.

For readers building a picture of Chinese media from individual titles, the paper is a useful case study in how much a single weekly could do with features and commentary: a 24-page launch in April 2001 became a 56-page and then 60-page Saturday institution, printed on salmon paper in conscious imitation of the Financial Times, distributed in China's first-tier cities, cited by international wires, and — in episodes such as the joint hukou editorial of March 2010 and the Wenzhou feature of July 2011 — willing to test the boundaries of what a Chinese newspaper could publish. Its slogan sums up the position it claimed for itself: rationality and constructiveness.