About Tonghua News Net

Tonghua News Net

Tonghua News Net is the official online news portal serving Tonghua, a prefecture-level city in southern Jilin Province, China. Published in Chinese, it carries local government, economy, society, livelihood and culture news for Tonghua and its subordinate districts, counties and county-level cities, and it is the city's dedicated local news website, produced by Tonghua's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting group. It is distinct from the print Tonghua Daily newspaper, whose reporting it carries alongside online-first local coverage and local government service information.

Tonghua is a mountain border prefecture with two nationally famous products: medicine and wine. Tucked into the Changbai Mountains near the Yalu River, it built a pharmaceutical industry on the region's ginseng and medicinal herbs, and a wine industry on the wild mountain grapes of its valleys — Tonghua wine was the only wine served at the banquet on the eve of the People's Republic's founding. Its portal reports on a prefecture where factory news means insulin plants and winery cellars, and where the ski slopes of Wanfeng are turning a medicine city toward winter tourism.

The portal and its place in Tonghua media

Tonghua News Net is the web flagship of the city's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting organisation. It publishes the newsroom's reporting continuously online, carries official announcements and government service information, and serves as Tonghua's dedicated local news website — the standing digital record of the prefecture's public life.

It is distinct from Tonghua Daily, the centre's print newspaper, whose journalism it carries and extends with online-first coverage, photography, video and service pages. The prefecture it serves is dispersed — urban districts in a river valley, county towns in the mountains, the border city of Ji'an on the Yalu — and the website is the connective tissue of that geography, delivering municipal information to communities a mountain road apart.

The portal operates as a licensed internet news information service under the national framework administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China, produced by local journalists for a local readership, with the pharmaceutical and wine industries, border affairs and mountain agriculture as its characteristic beats.

A Changbai mountain prefecture on the Yalu

Tonghua occupies the Changbai Mountain country of southern Jilin, more than two-thirds of it mountainous, drained by the Hun River and bounded in the south by the Yalu River, across which lies North Korea. Its territory includes the urban districts of the city proper and the counties and county-level cities of the mountains — among them Ji'an on the Yalu, Meihekou on the northern rail corridor, and Liuhe and Huinan in the hills. The mountains are rich in the natural products the prefecture is built on: ginseng, medicinal herbs, black fungus, blueberries and the wild Amur grape.

The climate is a mountain version of the northeast's continental pattern — long snowy winters, cool summers — and the latitude band between forty and forty-three degrees north, with its cold winters and warm days, is cited by the wine industry as the foundation of its grape country. For the portal, geography sets a sturdy agenda: forest protection, mountain road and snow management, reservoir and river affairs, and the border city's trade and tourism on the Yalu.

Mountain grapes and the wine of 1949

Tonghua's wine story begins with the wild mountain grape, Vitis amurensis, which grows in abundance between Liuhe County and Ji'an and which local people had fermented for generations. Industrial production of mountain grape wine began in the 1930s — making China, in People's Daily's account, one of only three countries then producing it — and the Tonghua Grape Wine company was founded in 1937. After 1949 the wine rose to national prominence as one of China's major wine exports and a fixture of state occasions: on 30 September 1949, Tonghua Grape Wine was the only wine served at the banquet marking the first plenary session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, on the eve of the founding ceremony of the People's Republic. It remains, in the industry's phrase, China's only wine brand named after its city, and the city promotes itself as a "Bordeaux of the East."

The industry's physical monument is the Tonghua Winery's underground cellar — described as the largest cluster-style underground oak-barrel cellar in the world, holding 772 great barrels of three to eight tonnes apiece and some six thousand tonnes of wine — which was listed in 2013 as a national key cultural relic protection unit. Through selective breeding, mountain grapes have been joined by cold-hardy hybrids such as Beibinghong, the basis of ice wines from the Ji'an valleys, and wines from Ji'an alone have won nearly a hundred domestic and international competition awards in recent years. Grape harvests, winery investment, wine festivals and the Yalu valley's wine tourism form a glossy, recurring strand of the portal's economy and culture coverage.

The medicine city: ginseng and insulin

If wine is Tonghua's fame, medicine is its economy. The Changbai Mountains are China's ginseng heartland, and Tonghua built on that base one of the country's notable regional pharmaceutical clusters: producers of traditional Chinese medicines from ginseng and mountain herbs, chemical and generic medicines, and — most prominently — Tonghua Dongbao Pharmaceutical, known nationally for its recombinant human insulin products, which made this remote mountain city a name in modern biopharmaceuticals. Provincial and city materials present pharmaceuticals as the prefecture's leading industry, and the portal's industry pages follow its listed companies, production expansions and research results accordingly.

The two industries share a root: both convert the mountain flora into bottled value, one through cellars and one through laboratories. Around them the portal reports a supporting economy of medicinal-herb cultivation, food processing — ginseng products, wines, herbal preparations — and the trade in mountain specialties that flows through the prefecture's markets each autumn.

Border, mountains and winter tourism

Tonghua's third strand is its landscape and border. Ji'an, the county-level city on the Yalu, holds the remains of the ancient Goguryeo kingdom's capital and its tombs — a World Heritage-listed landscape across the river from North Korea — and Yalu river tourism, rafting and valley scenery draw a growing visitor trade. In winter, the Wanfeng ski resort area in the mountains south of the city gives Tonghua a place in Jilin's ice-and-snow economy, and winter-sports investment is a development priority the portal tracks.

Border affairs give the prefecture's news a dimension most inland portals lack: Ji'an's port, cross-border viewing tourism, and the careful, officially reported rhythm of a frontier on the Yalu. Combined with forest ecology — the Changbai foothills hold more than two thousand plant species — the border and mountain coverage makes Tonghua News Net's tourism and society pages unusually varied for a small prefecture.

Government, society and livelihood coverage

The portal's daily core is municipal: city government meetings and policy, district and county administration, and livelihood reporting on heating, housing, schools, hospitals and employment for a dispersed mountain population. Ginseng-market prices, herb planting guidance and grape-growing information serve its farm readers; snow warnings, mountain-road information and river levels serve everyone.

Society and culture coverage follows the wine and grape festivals, Goguryeo heritage at Ji'an, Korean and Manchu minority communities within the prefecture, ski-season events at Wanfeng, and the civic life of the valley districts and mountain towns. It is, in sum, the public record of a prefecture whose identity — medicine, wine, mountains, border — is unusually well defined, and whose portal has the pleasant task of reporting all four.

Reading Tonghua through its portal

For outside readers, Tonghua News Net is the place to watch a resource periphery convert nature into industry twice over: herbs into pharmaceuticals, grapes into wine, and scenery into tourism. The national story of Tonghua is usually a single product — the 1949 wine, an insulin maker, an ice wine prize. The portal supplies the whole prefecture around those products, in the practical register of plant expansions, harvest reports and festival crowds.

Why Tonghua News Net matters

Tonghua News Net matters as the official online voice of a Changbai mountain prefecture whose wine was poured at the founding of the People's Republic and whose medicine industry reaches pharmacies across China. It is the primary local news source for Tonghua's residents and the web flagship of its converged media centre, and it stands in the WorldNM directory as the online news entry for Tonghua, Jilin: the daily record of China's wine-and-medicine city on the Yalu frontier.