About Wuxi Daily

Wuxi Daily

Wuxi Daily, known in Chinese as Wuxi Ribao, is the official newspaper of the Wuxi Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the flagship title of the Wuxi Daily Newspaper Group. It is published in Wuxi, an industrial city on the shore of Lake Tai in southern Jiangsu province, between Shanghai and the provincial capital, Nanjing. The newspaper is a broadsheet printed in full colour, priced at one yuan, and written in simplified Chinese. Its headquarters is the Wuxi Newspaper Building at 1 Finance Street 2 in the Taihu New City area of Binhu District. Reference histories, drawing on the Jiangsu provincial gazetteer, trace its origin to a workers' newspaper launched on 1 August 1949, a few months after the founding of the People's Republic of China, and the paper has carried its present name, with one long interruption in title, since 1957.

Origins in the Workers' Newspaper Gongren Shenghuo

The newspaper began on 1 August 1949 under the name Gongren Shenghuo, meaning Workers' Life. The Jiangsu gazetteer-based history describes it as a popular newspaper for workers, launched in the first year of the new state, when Wuxi's many textile mills and factories made it one of China's most industrial cities and a natural place for a paper addressed to an industrial workforce. In November 1952 the paper moved to Nanjing and was reorganised as Jiangsu Gongren Bao, the Jiangsu Workers' Newspaper, a provincial title. That experiment ended at the close of 1953, when the Nanjing paper ceased publication and most of its editorial staff returned to Wuxi. On 7 January 1954, Gongren Shenghuo resumed publication in Wuxi, this time in a new role: it became the official newspaper of the Wuxi Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. On 1 August 1957, eight years after the original launch, it was renamed Wuxi Daily, the name under which it is still published today.

Suspension, the Wuxi Bao Years and the Restoration of the Name

Like almost every Chinese newspaper, Wuxi Daily was swept away by the Cultural Revolution. It ceased publication in October 1966, months after that campaign began. For more than twelve years Wuxi had no municipal party newspaper of its own under this lineage. Publication resumed on 1 January 1979, but under a shorter name, Wuxi Bao, or Wuxi Newspaper, which again served as the official paper of the municipal party committee. The restoration of the full historic name came two years later: on 1 January 1981 the paper once again became Wuxi Daily. The sequence is worth noting because it mirrors the experience of many Chinese city party papers, which were suspended in 1966, revived cautiously at the end of the 1970s under temporary titles, and then reclaimed their pre-1966 names as the reform era normalised publishing. In 1985 the paper adopted the large broadsheet format of four pages that defined its modern print form.

Breaking the Postal Monopoly in 1987

The newspaper's most distinctive contribution to Chinese newspaper business history came in distribution. In January 1987, Wuxi Daily began distributing itself, setting up its own delivery operation instead of relying on the post office. The Jiangsu gazetteer-based history records it as the first newspaper in Jiangsu province to adopt self-distribution and to break the postal service's monopoly over newspaper delivery. At the time, Chinese newspapers were normally delivered through the state postal system, which publishers criticised for slow and unreliable service to subscribers. Building a paper's own distribution network was a significant commercial step, giving the publisher control over delivery times, subscription sales and reader data, and Wuxi Daily's move was an early Jiangsu example of the self-distribution model that larger Chinese newspaper groups later adopted widely. It fits the city's character: Wuxi, a historic centre of Chinese private industry and commerce, produced a party newspaper that experimented early with the business side of publishing.

Format, Circulation and Readership

Wuxi Daily is today a full-colour broadsheet. Its reference profile describes an edition running to at least one, two or four pages beyond its core pagination each week, with a circulation of about 50,000 copies, the highest among news newspapers in the Wuxi area, covering the city of Wuxi itself together with the county-level cities it administers, Jiangyin and Yixing, and surrounding districts. Circulation alone understates its reach, because Chinese party newspapers are commonly passed from reader to reader in workplaces and households. The profile, citing survey material, puts the paper's pass-along readership at between 550,000 and 600,000 people, rising to a million on major news days, and reports that individual subscribers had come to account for more than 40 percent of subscriptions, a shift the paper treated as evidence of genuine household demand rather than only institutional purchasing. The same profile reported survey findings that 91.2 percent of Wuxi residents obtained information from newspapers, and that Wuxi Daily accounted for 86.97 percent of that newspaper readership. Its core readers were described as civil servants, business managers and city residents with stable incomes. These are the paper's own reported figures rather than audited data, but they describe the position it claims as Wuxi's dominant mainstream medium.

Among the First Chinese Newspapers Online

Wuxi Daily was an early mover in digital publishing. Its reference history states that it was the first newspaper in Jiangsu to launch an online newspaper service, and that it later developed into an all-media operation combining print with web, mobile, audio and video output. The paper's digital edition is published through the Wuxi new media platforms of its group, and print pages are reproduced as an e-paper. In a national scholarly study of Chinese newspapers, Wuxi Daily was classified in the category of official newspapers, with its sponsor listed as the Wuxi Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party; the same study listed Jiangnan Evening News, the group's popular evening title, as a non-official newspaper sponsored by Wuxi Daily, which captures the two-track structure of the group: a party organ for authority and an evening paper for the retail market, fed increasingly by shared digital newsrooms.

The Wuxi Daily Newspaper Group

In 2003 the publisher was reorganised as the Wuxi Daily Newspaper Group, with Wuxi Daily as its flagship. According to the group's own profile, its holdings have included Jiangnan Evening News, its main popular title; Wuxi Business News, which has since ceased publication; East China Travel News; Jiangnan Health News; the magazines Xiu Jiangnan and Jin Shangquan; the China Biochemical Pharmaceutical journal; a Wuxi branch of Phoenix Publishing; and Jiangsu Taihu Digital Publishing. The pattern is typical of Chinese municipal newspaper groups formed in the 2000s, which gathered the party daily, an evening paper, specialist and lifestyle titles, and publishing and digital businesses under one management. The group's president was listed in reference sources as Yang Jian. Through these changes the masthead of the flagship did not move: Wuxi Daily remained the municipal party committee's official newspaper, described in its profiles as having always been one of Wuxi's mainstream media.

A Newsroom Landmark: Photographer Xue Zhongqing

One of the best documented individual careers at the newspaper is that of Xue Zhongqing, whose story was told by China Daily in 2024 when he became curator of a new museum of Wuxi city history. Xue, who had studied fine art at college in 1991 and hoped to become a news photographer, was hired by Wuxi Daily in 1993 as a graphic editor, a different job from the one he wanted. After six years in the graphics department he became a reporter in 1999 and began documenting the life of the city. His best-known project was a photographic series on the construction workers building the Wuxi section of the Shanghai-Nanjing intercity railway in 2009; the photographs won national recognition in 2010, taking a silver award in the annual competition of the China Photojournalists Society. From the 2010s he moved into academic research on media communication, publishing nearly fifty articles and theses, and became deputy head of the Wuxi All-Media Communication Association and a guest professor at Wuxi Taihu University. His appointment to curate the city's history museum, China Daily reported, was a journalistic turn for the museum: a reporter, in his own words, is a witness to news and historical events. The episode illustrates the place a municipal party newspaper's newsroom holds in a Chinese city, supplying not only daily coverage but also photographers and chroniclers who become custodians of the city's record.

The Move to Taihu New City

For most of its modern life the newspaper was based in the old city centre, at 1 Xueqian East Road in Chong'an District, in the Wuxi newspaper news building. On 15 December 2013 the paper moved as a whole to its present home, the Wuxi Newspaper Building at 1 Finance Street 2 in Taihu New City, Binhu District, the new administrative and financial quarter built on the northern shore of Lake Tai. The relocation placed the newsroom in the same new district as much of the municipal government it covers, and it coincided with the group's push into converged, all-media production. The building's address is the one now given as the newspaper's headquarters in its reference listings, and the group's digital and e-paper operations run from there.

Place in Jiangsu Journalism

Wuxi Daily's history contains, in miniature, the main chapters of a Chinese city party newspaper's life since 1949: a workers' paper founded in the year of the People's Republic, a brief promotion to a provincial workers' title in Nanjing, restoration as the municipal party organ in 1954, the present name from 1957, suspension during the Cultural Revolution, revival as Wuxi Bao in 1979 and restoration of its name in 1981. Its 1987 decision to distribute itself, recorded as the first such move in Jiangsu, and its early launch of an online edition, the first in the province, show a commercially alert streak unusual in summaries of party newspapers. Reorganised into a newspaper group in 2003, publisher of Jiangnan Evening News and other titles, and relocated to Taihu New City in 2013, it remains what it became in 1954: the official newspaper of the Wuxi Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and, by its own readership figures, the most widely passed-around news newspaper in its city.