About Xi'an Television

Xi'an Television

Xi'an Television is the city-level television station of Xi'an, the capital of Shaanxi Province in north-central China. It is a municipal broadcaster serving one city, and that distinction matters in Xi'an more than in most Chinese cities, because the much larger provincial broadcaster, Shaanxi Television, is also based in the city. Xi'an Television speaks to Xi'an itself, in Mandarin, with local news and local programming, and with film, history and cultural output that reflects a city unlike any other in China: known for most of its long history as Chang'an, Xi'an was the capital of some of the most important dynasties in Chinese history, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and the home of the Terracotta Army. English-language documentation of the station itself is limited, and this profile is careful to separate what is verified about the station from the well-documented context of the city and the television system in which it operates.

Not to be confused with Shaanxi Television

Two separate broadcasters are based in Xi'an. Shaanxi Television, also known as SXTV, is the provincial network: it began broadcasting on 1 July 1960, is majority-owned by the propaganda department of the Shaanxi Provincial Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and speaks for the whole of Shaanxi Province from a satellite platform. In December 2024 the provincial propaganda department and the Shaanxi Television and Radio Group together formed an international communication centre. Xi'an Television is a different organisation at a different level of the system. It is the city's own station, with a municipal rather than a provincial remit, numbered local channels rather than a satellite service, and an audience defined by the city and its districts rather than by the province. Viewers in Xi'an can receive both, which is precisely why the two are so often confused by outside observers.

The city the station serves

Xi'an is the capital of Shaanxi, located in the south-central part of the province at the southern limit of the Loess Plateau, on the south bank of the Wei River. It is a sub-provincial city and one of the oldest cities in China, with more than 3,100 years of history. Cities have existed in the area since the 11th century BCE. Xi'an is counted among the Four Great Ancient Capitals of China because it served, under various names, as the capital of dynasties including the Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui and Tang. For a municipal broadcaster, that inheritance is not background decoration. It is the defining fact of the audience: a large modern provincial capital whose residents live among, and identify strongly with, some of the most famous historic sites in Asia.

Chang'an, the Silk Road and the Terracotta Army

Before the Ming dynasty the city was known as Chang'an, a name usually translated as Perpetual Peace; the name Xi'an, meaning Western Peace, was restored in 1943. Chang'an Cheng, the walled Han capital built in 202 BCE just northwest of present-day Xi'an, was the capital of the Western Han dynasty and one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. Xi'an was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that connected China with the Mediterranean, and a market and trade centre of international importance. Its best-known treasure is the Terracotta Army, the life-sized terracotta figures made during the Qin dynasty as part of the tomb of China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who reigned from 221 to 210 BCE; the site was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987. Other landmarks carry the same weight: construction of the Great Wild Goose Pagoda began in 652, built to store the translations of Buddhist sutras brought from India by the monk Xuanzang. A city television station in Xi'an therefore works in a place where history and culture are living local subjects, not imported programming themes.

Position in China's television system

Xi'an Television occupies the city level of a system that was deliberately built in layers. In 1983 the Eleventh National Work Meeting on Radio and Television set out a four-level administrative structure for Chinese broadcasting, covering the central government, provinces, cities and counties. By the late 1980s China had a national network, 30 province-level stations and more than 200 city-level stations, and stations at both provincial and city level produced and aired their own programmes locally. Some cities, like Xi'an, have two separate stations, one at provincial level and one at city level, based in the same place. City stations sit under both the national regulator and their local party and government authorities, and cable television is the usual transmission method in urban areas of mainland China, with cable systems carrying the channels of the municipalities and provinces as well as the national CCTV channels in Mandarin. That is the framework inside which Xi'an Television commissions, schedules and broadcasts.

What is documented about its channels

The station operates a set of numbered channels, of which two are documented in English-language sources. Industry data published by Advertising Age in 2005, drawn from Nielsen Media Research, ranked the local channels in Xi'an by advertising revenue and placed a Xi'an TV channel, Xi'an TV 2, fourth among the city's local channels, behind three Shaanxi Television channels — evidence that, even two decades ago, the municipal station held a measurable place in a market dominated by its provincial neighbour. The station's fourth channel is documented separately as a film and television channel, described below. Beyond those references, English sources do not publish a reliable full channel list or a verified founding date for the station, and none is claimed here; the station's own Chinese-language presentation is the authoritative source for its current lineup.

A home cinema for the city: the cultural film and video channel

The clearest statement of Xi'an Television's cultural remit comes from its fourth channel, the Xi'an Cultural Film and Video Channel. The channel was created by separating the film and video resources held inside the station's various channels and reassembling them, after a comprehensive reform, into a single new channel combining those resources. Its stated editing and broadcasting idea is to show the films loved by ordinary people, and its stated goal is to build the Xi'an people's own home cinema, so that residents can enjoy film and television without leaving home. The channel's own description argues that films and television plays are the main content of television programming and the source of its highest audience interest. In a city whose identity is built on history, a dedicated cultural film and video service is a natural municipal offering, and it is the part of Xi'an Television's output that most directly reflects the ancient-capital heritage described in the station's brief.

Livelihood news in Xi'an

The best-documented strand of local television journalism in Xi'an is minsheng xinwen, literally news about people's livelihood. The genre rose across China in the late 1990s as local stations, under market-oriented reforms, adopted a populist approach focused on stories resonating with daily life, alongside a policy of supervision by public opinion that encouraged outlets to report local governance problems. Scholarship on the genre discusses Xi'an through the programme Xi'an Zero Distance and its report of 9 April 2017, which told the story of residents who had prepaid nearly a decade earlier for homes that remained half-built skeletons — the widespread rotten-tail buildings problem. The report gave residents a voice without naming the departments responsible, and it formed part of a broader Xi'an media supervision initiative: by July 2017 the municipal government had launched new radio programmes and online platforms for citizen complaints, and in a follow-up case journalists referred a complaint to the Xi'an Housing Security and Management Bureau, which fined the developer. That record captures what city-level television news in Xi'an is for: everyday grievances, pursued on air, inside carefully drawn boundaries.

Language, audience and remit

Xi'an Television broadcasts in Mandarin, the standard language of Chinese television and of the national channels its viewers also receive, and its remit is the city rather than the province or the nation. Its natural subjects follow from that remit: municipal news and public affairs, the daily life and grievances of Xi'an residents, and the history and culture of the city itself — its dynastic past, its Silk Road story, its pagodas, walls and museums, and its present life as a major centre of education, science and aerospace technology alongside tourism. Where the provincial satellite channel must interest a province and a national cable audience, the city station can assume local knowledge and local attachment, and its film and cultural programming can draw on stories and settings its audience can visit.

Xi'an Television today

Xi'an Television continues as Xi'an's municipal station in a national environment that is now contracting as well as expanding. Since 2023 China's broadcasting authority has pursued a campaign to streamline and specialise the country's radio and television landscape, and industry trackers counted dozens of channel closures across China in 2024 and again in 2025, hitting provincial-level broadcasters in Shaanxi among other provinces, as audiences and advertising move to digital platforms. No verified English-language report records a closure or merger of the Xi'an city station itself, and none is asserted here. What the record supports is a clear identity: a city-level Mandarin broadcaster, distinct from the provincial Shaanxi network based in the same city, carrying local news in the livelihood tradition and film and cultural programming shaped by the most historically loaded cityscape in China — the ancient capital of Chang'an.