About The World of Chinese

The World of Chinese

Overview

The World of Chinese is an English-language magazine about Chinese language and culture, published in Beijing, China, by the Commercial Press. Founded in 2006 and relaunched into its current format at the beginning of 2011, it is a bimonthly magazine and web portal dedicated to Chinese language and culture, targeted at expatriates living in China and at students studying the language. Each issue focuses on one specific aspect of Chinese culture and explores it in depth, across themes such as adventure, social media and youth, alongside travel within China and Chinese cuisine. Its publisher's own description gives the current measure of the title: each magazine features over one hundred pages of in-depth features on Chinese life and society, analysis of the latest online trends, investigations into ancient cultural phenomena, photo stories of everyday life and language-learning material. The magazine calls itself the last print magazine in China focusing on original feature-writing and photography in English, and in 2026 it marked its twentieth anniversary. It extends, into English-language teaching and cultural publishing, the magazine tradition of the Commercial Press — the great Shanghai-founded publishing house whose periodicals shaped Chinese reading in the twentieth century.

The Commercial Press and the Magazine's Founding

The World of Chinese is owned by the Commercial Press, one of China's oldest and most prestigious publishing houses, a leader in dictionaries, reference works and Chinese-language teaching materials. The magazine was founded in 2006, in the period when Beijing's international population was growing rapidly ahead of the 2008 Olympics and when demand for sophisticated English-language media about China — written from inside China — was expanding with it. Its institutional home shapes its character in two ways. First, authority: a magazine about the Chinese language published by the house most associated with Chinese lexicography and language publishing can treat slang, characters and usage with a scholar's confidence. Second, reach into education: the Commercial Press's channels into schools, universities and language programmes worldwide give a language-and-culture magazine a natural subscription base among learners and teachers. Reference descriptions of the magazine add that it extends the Commercial Press's century-old magazine-publishing tradition into English-language teaching publishing — a pointed summary, since the Press's earlier magazines, from The Eastern Miscellany onward, were among the most influential Chinese periodicals ever published, in Chinese, whereas this one performs the analogous cultural mediation in English, for the world looking in.

The 2011 Relaunch

The magazine was relaunched into its current format at the beginning of 2011. Whereas previous incarnations had included content such as business and economics, and had made much greater use of the Chinese language, the relaunched version leans more on contemporary issues in Chinese society. That editorial pivot — from a business-and-language hybrid toward in-depth features on Chinese life and society — defines the modern title. Each issue is organised around a single theme and explores one aspect of Chinese culture in depth: broad themes documented in the magazine's descriptions include adventure, social media and youth, and its recent covers show the method at work, with themed issues on kinder cities, on life after the factory, on China's small towns and lower-tier cities, and on the development of China's internet thirty years on. Alongside the cover theme, an issue mixes analysis of online trends and slang, investigations of cultural phenomena ancient and modern, photo stories and language-learning material — a formula the magazine has sustained in print, at over one hundred pages an issue, while English-language print in China contracted around it.

Readers: Expatriates and Learners

The World of Chinese is targeted at expatriates living in China and at students studying the language — two readerships that overlap in the desire to understand contemporary China from inside its language. For expatriate readers, the magazine offers what international media cannot: long-form features written in Beijing about the society they live in, including the internet culture, workplace life, food and travel that structure daily experience. For learners, it offers something textbooks cannot: current, idiomatic Chinese in its social habitat — the latest online trends, social Chinese, characters explored one by one — presented by a publishing house whose core business is teaching the language. The magazine's language pages are a signature: recurring features take a single Chinese character and unfold its structure, history and usage, or decode the idioms and social phrases of the moment. The blend is commercially astute and editorially coherent. A learner who reads about the society becomes a better reader of the language; an expatriate who picks up the language reads the society more deeply. The World of Chinese is built for the reader who wants both.

Milestones: The 100th Issue and Twenty Years

Two recent milestones mark the magazine's durability. Its one hundredth issue shone the spotlight on China's small towns and lower-tier cities — from Hefei to Zhengzhou, Qingdao to Zhaoqing — where, as the magazine put it, most of the urban population live and some of the richest human stories lie; the choice of subject, turning away from the megacities that dominate English-language coverage of China, is a fair emblem of the title's editorial instincts. And in July 2026 the magazine celebrated its twentieth anniversary and a new-issue launch with its team, readers and friends at Beijing's Shixi Teahouse — twenty years after its 2006 founding, in a market where the magazine itself observes that it has dedicated itself for fifteen of those years to becoming a leading resource for in-depth reporting and quality writing on China. Surviving two decades as an English-language print magazine in China is a distinction in itself: the period saw the closure or digital migration of most comparable titles. The World of Chinese attributes its own survival to its readers' support for original feature-writing and photography in English, a niche it now occupies, by its own account, alone in print.

Print, Digital and the Paywall

The magazine's business has evolved with its readership's habits. It is published in print as a bimonthly, sold singly and in bundles — its shop offered a 2023 bundle of four issues — and it operates a substantial web portal at theworldofchinese.com, where its language, society, travel and food coverage is published continuously, in the categories its site organises around how people live in contemporary China. In May 2022 it moved toward a paid subscription model for its online content, introducing a soft paywall: much remained free after registration, while subscribers received premium access to feature archives, short documentaries and exclusive podcasts. The magazine explained the move candidly as a condition of continuing to tell quality stories in a challenging and competitive media environment, and it reminded readers that print subscriptions come with full digital access. The transition mirrors that of quality magazines worldwide, but with a local twist — payment runs through PayPal and international cards as well as WeChat Pay and Alipay, reflecting a readership split between learners abroad and residents in China. Print, portal, documentary video and podcast now form one title across four media, anchored by the bimonthly issue.

The Language Mission

At the centre of the magazine, underneath the features, sits a language mission that distinguishes it from every other English-language China magazine. The site and magazine treat Chinese itself as a subject: the anatomy of characters, the social life of idioms, the vocabulary of new phenomena from internet culture to investment slang, and the way the language is changing in the mouths of its youngest speakers. Articles in its language vertical range from character studies — a single character that builds and repairs, or that reaps everything from crops to profits — to explainers of the words moving from restaurant menus into the world's dictionaries. For the Commercial Press, whose dictionaries and textbooks teach Chinese globally, such content is the house speciality translated into magazine form; for readers, it is a standing invitation to treat every feature as also a lesson. Other English-language magazines in China have covered the society, the food and the travel; The World of Chinese is the one that set out, from its 2006 founding and decisively from its 2011 relaunch, to cover the language with the same seriousness, as the key that unlocks the rest.

Standing and Legacy

The World of Chinese occupies a defined and, by now, historic niche. Founded in Beijing in 2006, relaunched in 2011, published bimonthly by the Commercial Press, it is the English-language magazine of Chinese language and culture for expatriates and learners — the last print magazine in China, by its own account, devoted to original feature-writing and photography in English. Its formula of themed issues, society features, online-trend analysis, photo stories and language material has carried it to a hundredth issue and a twentieth anniversary, milestones few English-language titles in China have reached. Institutionally, it carries the Commercial Press's century-old magazine tradition into a new language and century. For its readers — the student in Ohio, the teacher in Berlin, the resident of Beijing — it performs a function no other current title performs in print: a hundred pages at a time, in English, from inside China, about the language and the life that explains it. That is the ground on which its next decades will be built.