About Wenzhou Television

Wenzhou Television

Wenzhou Television is the city broadcaster of Wenzhou, the ancient port city of southern Zhejiang province in eastern China, operated by the Wenzhou Radio and Television Media Group. Headquartered in Wenzhou, the station serves a population of more than nine million people across the Wenzhou area, broadcasting Mandarin news, drama and local programming — including programming in the Wenzhou dialect — for the metropolitan area, distinct from the provincial Zhejiang Television service in Hangzhou. Wenzhou Television is best documented internationally for its comprehensive upgrade to full high-definition production, and it operates in the city famous throughout China for private enterprise and for one of the country's largest overseas diasporas.

A broadcaster for a city of nine million

Wenzhou is a prefecture-level city whose administrative area holds more than nine million people, and its television station is scaled accordingly: trade reporting on the station describes Wenzhou TV as a Chinese regional broadcaster headquartered in the ancient port of Wenzhou, serving that population of more than nine million in Zhejiang province. The station is organised within the Wenzhou Radio and Television Media Group, the converged municipal media organisation that combines the city's television and radio services, including an economic radio frequency documented in local cultural programming partnerships. As with other Chinese prefecture-level broadcasters, its television channels carry municipal news, drama, variety and livelihood programming, with the city's own affairs — its private businesses, its port and its far-flung emigrant communities — as their defining subject matter.

The move to full HD production

The best-documented episode in the station's modern technical history is its upgrade to full high-definition production. In September 2015 Wenzhou TV purchased a complete production infrastructure, conversion and switching solution from Snell, the British broadcast technology company, as part of its upgrade to full HD production from studio to screen. The equipment was supplied through Snell's regional partner, Beijing Xingguang Sanitec Science and Technology Company. Production switching is handled by a Kahuna 6400 production switcher, enabling simultaneous support and conversion of standard-definition, high-definition and 1080p signals across all inputs and outputs, while Snell IQ Modular equipment provides the video and audio processing infrastructure, including digital-to-analogue conversion, synchronisation, conversion and audio processing modules. The station's HD news service was scheduled to go live in September 2015. Wenzhou TV was already a Snell customer for both studio and outside-broadcast equipment before the upgrade, and trade coverage quoted the partner's vice chief engineer, Li Yannian, saying the solutions were chosen because they covered all of Wenzhou TV's current needs and gave plenty of room for future growth and expansion as its business developed. The project illustrates the scale of capital investment Chinese regional broadcasters undertook in the mid-2010s as high definition became the expected standard for city television.

News at the centre of the schedule

The HD investment was directed first at news: it was the HD news service that led the 2015 launch. That priority reflects the structure of Chinese municipal broadcasting, in which the city news bulletin is the flagship programme around which the rest of the schedule is built, and in which the station acts as the authoritative local source alongside national bulletins relayed from Beijing. Wenzhou's news agenda is shaped by its economy. This is the city whose name became shorthand in China for private enterprise, family workshops grown into manufacturing businesses, and traders operating across China and abroad; a Wenzhou television newsroom covers business and livelihood stories with an intensity unusual even by Chinese standards, because in Wenzhou commerce is the central fact of local life.

Wenzhou dialect and local culture on air

Wenzhou is famous for its dialect, a Wu Chinese variety often described as one of the most difficult in China for outsiders to understand, and local broadcasting is one of the places where it is heard in public life. Local reporting records a Speak Wenzhou Dialect column associated with the city's radio and television services, which carried, for example, an original drum-lyrics programme, Pulling Seedlings to Promote Growth, created to take Wenzhou drum lyrics — a traditional sung storytelling art — into schools; the recording session for the programme was arranged with the municipal radio and television station and its partner music broadcast. Such programming shows the municipal broadcaster acting as a custodian of local speech and folk art, preserving forms of Wenzhou culture that national media have no reason to carry.

Television for a worldwide diaspora

No Chinese city broadcaster operates in quite Wenzhou's international context. Zhejiang provincial reporting records that more than 688,900 Wenzhou people work and live in 131 countries and regions, and that the city has built an international communications base, with centres for global communications, cultural exchanges and cross-border services, on the strength of that diaspora. By January 2019 Wenzhou had launched 45 Chinese media organisations outside China, the latest being an outlet in Spain. The Wenzhou Daily Media Group's IL Tempo Cina Europa is described as one of the largest Chinese media outlets in Europe, wholly owned by the group with branches in 13 countries. The city has also rolled out television dramas reflecting China's development since reform and opening up to audiences in countries including France, South Korea and Panama, and Wenzhou stories such as the television drama Wenzhou Two Families have carried the city's business saga to national and overseas screens. Wenzhou Television's own local programming sits at the home end of this outward-looking media system: the hometown service for a population a significant share of which watches, in every sense, from abroad.

Wenzhou enterprise and television abroad

The city's business community has itself bought into television overseas. In 2009 the Xiking Group, led by Wenzhou businessman Ye Maoxi, bought the British digital satellite channel Propeller TV, announcing that the channel would air programmes promoting Chinese culture, with specific programmes to introduce China and Wenzhou, some broadcast in Chinese. China Briefing's report of the purchase noted that it was not the first such acquisition by a Wenzhou businessman: in 2006 Wang Weisheng had bought a television station in the United Arab Emirates. These ventures are separate from the municipal broadcaster, but they belong to the same story — a city whose entrepreneurs treat media as a natural extension of trade, and whose municipal television service reports on a community whose horizons are routinely international.

Radio and the wider media group

Television is only part of the Wenzhou Radio and Television Media Group's output. The group operates radio services for the city, among them an economic frequency documented as a sponsor, with the Wenzhou Metropolis Daily and district cultural authorities, of the Sound Reading cultural reading programme, which brings writers, performers and readers together in recorded sessions shared across the group's platforms. The same local reporting shows the group's radio presenters and musicians appearing on national stages, including CCTV-3, carrying Wenzhou's cultural work to national audiences. This pattern — a converged group in which television, radio, newspapers' sister titles and cultural programming reinforce one another — is the standard organisational form of Chinese municipal media, and in Wenzhou it is strengthened by the city's unusually active cultural and business life.

Position in Zhejiang broadcasting

Within Zhejiang, Wenzhou Television is the prefecture-level service for the province's south, distinct from Zhejiang Television's satellite flagship in Hangzhou and from the province's other city broadcasters such as Ningbo Television. Its audience of more than nine million across the Wenzhou area makes it one of the larger municipal television operations in eastern China. Its combination of a full-HD production base, dialect and folk-culture programming, and an emigrant-facing city identity gives it a character quite different from the provincial service: Wenzhou Television is the broadcaster of a merchant city that happens to be scattered across the world, and its schedules are built for viewers who may be watching from the next street or from another continent.