About Xiamen Net

Xiamen Net

Xiamen Net, published at xmnn.cn, is the digital news portal of the Xiamen Daily Media Group in Xiamen, Fujian province. It serves as the city's principal municipal online news gateway, publishing Xiamen city news, cross-strait coverage and the newspaper group's editions online. In China's system of licensed internet news services it is listed among Fujian's municipal news websites, which places it in the recognised tier of official city portals rather than among commercial aggregators or personal media accounts. For readers who want to know what has happened in Xiamen today — in its districts, its port, its schools and hospitals, and in its unusually close relationship with Taiwan across the strait — Xiamen Net is the group's front door on the internet.

A municipal gateway for a special economic zone city

Xiamen is a sub-provincial city in southeastern Fujian, beside the Taiwan Strait. The Fujian provincial government describes it as a beautiful seaside city facing the Kinmen Islands and lying opposite Taiwan and the Penghu Islands across the strait. It administers six districts — Siming, Huli, Jimei, Haicang, Tong'an and Xiang'an — over a land area of about 1,700 square kilometres. Xiamen has been a trading port since ancient times and a gateway for China's opening up and external cooperation, and it was one of the earliest special economic zones established in the reform era. That combination — a port city, an investment zone and the mainland city closest in everyday life to Kinmen and Taiwan — shapes almost everything its municipal news portal covers.

A city portal in such a place cannot be only a bulletin board for official announcements. Traders, Taiwan-funded companies, students, commuters between the island districts and the mainland districts, and families with relatives across the strait all read the same front page for different reasons. Xiamen Net's role, as the Xiamen Daily Media Group's portal, is to hold those audiences together in one place: municipal news first, but framed by the cross-strait and economic coverage that makes Xiamen different from an inland prefectural city of similar size.

The newspaper behind the portal: Xiamen Daily

The parent title is Xiamen Daily, the official newspaper of the Xiamen municipal committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Its origins were settled before the city itself changed hands in 1949: on 25 May 1949, during deliberations on establishing the Fujian Provincial Committee of the CCP, the East China Bureau resolved to publish two party newspapers after the liberation of Fujian — Fujian Daily as the organ of the provincial committee, and Xiamen Daily as the organ of the Xiamen Municipal CCP Committee. A scholarly history of Xiamen publishing notes that Xiamen Daily was in fact the only legal newspaper in Xiamen during the major political movements of the Mao era, and that both Xiamen Daily and the Xiamen Evening News have been supervised by the publicity department of the municipal party committee.

That party-paper lineage matters for understanding the website. Xiamen Net is not a start-up that later acquired a newspaper; it is the online extension of a newsroom whose first duty, for more than seven decades, has been to publish the authoritative municipal record. When the site carries a policy document, a personnel announcement or an official response, it does so with the standing of the party newspaper behind it — the same standing that makes its digital newspaper editions a reference copy for readers who no longer buy print.

Inside the Xiamen Daily Media Group

Public filings by a group-related listed company give a clear picture of the structure around the portal. In those filings, Xiamen Daily is named as the actual controller, and Xiamen Newspaper Media Group Co., Ltd. — the Xiamen Daily Media Group — as the controlling shareholder. The same filings list the group's newspaper family: the Xiamen Evening News organisation and the Haixi Morning Post organisation are both sponsored by Xiamen Daily, and group companies include newspaper distribution, advertising and new-media businesses. Significantly for the website, Haixia Network (Xiamen) Media Co., Ltd. is listed as wholly held by Xiamen Daily, alongside a separate Xiamen new-media communications company also wholly held by the newspaper.

In practical terms, that means Xiamen Net sits inside a full newspaper group rather than beside one. A morning paper, an evening paper and a party daily feed one digital gateway; distribution and advertising arms that once served print now support a business whose main product is read on phones. Readers see the result as a single portal, but the reporting, photography and page production behind it come from the combined newsrooms of the group.

What Xiamen Net publishes

The portal's core is Xiamen city news: municipal government decisions, district news from Siming to Xiang'an, education, health, transport, housing and the everyday service information a city resident needs. To that it adds the group's newspaper editions online, so that the printed Xiamen Daily and its sister papers can be read digitally. Around the city core sit the wider layers a portal is expected to provide — Fujian provincial news, national and international news, finance, culture and sport — but the hierarchy is clear in the site's own identity: it is Xiamen's gateway first, and a general news site second.

The bylines tell the same story. Reports syndicated across Chinese news sites are routinely credited in the form “Xiamen Net report (Xiamen Daily reporter …)”, showing copy moving from the newspaper's reporters through the website to national platforms. A recent example concerned the opening of a registration service window for Taiwan compatriots and Taiwan-funded enterprises in Dadeng, Xiang'an district — reported by a Xiamen Daily reporter and published by Xiamen Net — in which the city's market-regulation officials explained one-stop business registration for Taiwan investors. It is a small story, but a characteristic one: municipal administration, reported by the municipal paper, on the municipal portal.

Cross-strait coverage: the defining beat

No mainland city portal carries the Taiwan brief quite as Xiamen's does. The clean geographical facts explain why. The Kinmen Islands administered by Taiwan lie roughly ten kilometres away, and the Xiamen Special Economic Zone was from early on designed with Taiwan in mind: Haicang and Xinglin were designated Taiwan Businessmen Investment Zones on 20 May 1989, and Jimei followed in 1992. According to the reporting published through Xiamen Net in October 2026, Xiamen now counts nearly 7,500 Taiwan-funded enterprises — more than half of Fujian province's total — and Dadeng in Xiang'an, close to Kinmen, is described as a front-line area for Taiwan youth entrepreneurship and Kinmen compatriots' travel to and from the mainland.

Cross-strait coverage on the portal therefore ranges well beyond high politics. It includes ferry and travel movements, business registration and investment services for Taiwan companies, care and schooling for Taiwan families living in Xiamen, cultural and religious exchanges across the strait, and the progress of cross-strait integration policies for which Fujian and Xiamen serve as the demonstration ground. For Taiwan businesspeople living in the city — a readership the site has served since the print era — this is service journalism as much as news.

Covering the special economic zone economy

The Xiamen Special Economic Zone was established in October 1980, originally covering just 2.5 square kilometres. It was expanded to 131 square kilometres in 1984, covering the whole of Xiamen Island, and in June 2010 the State Council approved its expansion to the whole city, adding the four mainland districts of Jimei, Haicang, Tong'an and Xiang'an. In February 1994 Xiamen had already been confirmed as a sub-provincial city, with provincial-level authority in economic administration. The Fujian government reports that Xiamen's gross regional product reached 898.04 billion yuan in 2025, up 5.7 percent year on year — figures of the kind the portal's economic coverage tracks through ports, trade, aviation maintenance, supply chains and foreign investment.

Xiamen Net's reform-era reporting reflects that history. Its long-form coverage marking the approach of the special economic zone's 45th anniversary in 2026 catalogued first-in-the-nation reforms tested in the city, from ship certification procedures to mechanisms for the safe export of containerised lithium-battery energy-storage systems photographed at Dongdu port for Xiamen Daily. For a business reader, the portal functions as the running log of an economy that was deliberately built as an experiment — and is still reported that way by its own newspaper group.

Districts, islands and everyday city life

Xiamen's geography gives its city news a distinctive texture. The historic centre sits on Xiamen Island, in Siming and Huli districts; Gulangyu, the small island off Siming famous for its historic international settlement, sits within the municipal story; and the four mainland districts each have their own industrial and rural hinterlands. A portal serving all six districts must move in a single day between island heritage conservation, mainland factory news, university life in Jimei, port industry in Haicang, and agriculture and the new airport area in Xiang'an. Southern Fujianese — Minnan language and culture — is the predominant local background, as the municipal government's own overview notes, and the portal's cultural coverage of Minnan traditions, overseas-Chinese hometown ties and temple and festival life speaks to that identity.

This is also where the evening-paper and morning-paper traditions inside the group matter. Party-paper news tells residents what the city has decided; the group's lifestyle and social reporting tells them how the city is living — food, weather, traffic, school places, hospital services and the small neighbourhood stories that make a municipal portal a daily habit rather than an occasional reference.

How the portal fits Fujian's media map

Fujian's online news landscape is layered. At provincial level, Fujian Daily's group operates its own portals; city portals such as Xiamen Net, Fuzhou's portal in the provincial capital and Quanzhou's services sit beneath it; and regional Minnan services cover the Xiamen–Zhangzhou–Quanzhou triangle as a cultural unit. Xiamen Net's listed status as a Fujian municipal key news website confirms its place in the middle layer: authoritative for Xiamen, distinct from the provincial gateway, and the address national media most often credit when they republish Xiamen municipal reporting — as the syndicated bylines on major Chinese news platforms show.

It also coexists with a separate broadcasting system: Xiamen Media Group, formed on 28 June 2004 from Xiamen Television and the People's Radio Station of Xiamen, runs the city's television and radio. Readers therefore distinguish between the newspaper group's portal at xmnn.cn and the broadcaster's services — two municipal systems, one for print-born journalism and one for broadcast, covering the same city.

Why Xiamen Net matters

Xiamen Net matters because it concentrates, in one verified address, the three things Xiamen readers most need from a municipal portal: the authoritative record of a party newspaper founded on a 1949 decision and still controlled through the Xiamen Daily Media Group; practical, district-by-district city journalism produced by the group's combined daily, morning and evening newsrooms; and sustained cross-strait coverage grounded in the city's real geography — ten kilometres from Kinmen, home to nearly 7,500 Taiwan-funded enterprises, and built since 1980 as a special economic zone oriented toward Taiwan. Other sites can aggregate Xiamen headlines. Only the newspaper group's own portal can claim to be where the city's official story is first and most completely told.