About Xiangshan Daily

Xiangshan Daily

Xiangshan Daily (Chinese: 象山日报; pinyin: Xiangshan Ribao) is the county party newspaper of Xiangshan County in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, China. It is a Chinese-language local daily in the Zhejiang tradition of county-level party papers — the tier of China's press system in which a county party committee publishes a newspaper for its own territory. Xiangshan is unlike any other county in that system. It occupies the eastern end of the Xiangshan Peninsula on the East China Sea coast, surrounded by sea on three sides, with a land area of about 1,382 square kilometres, a sea area of about 6,618 square kilometres, some 925 kilometres of coastline and more than 600 islands and reefs. It is one of China's great fishing counties, centred on the historic port of Shipu, and in recent decades it has added a second identity as a national film and television production base. Xiangshan Daily is the daily record of that maritime county: its fleet and its fishing moratorium, its island villages, its shipyards and seafood markets, and its county government.

A county surrounded by the sea

Geography is the first fact of Xiangshan journalism. The county sits between two great bodies of water: Xiangshan Harbor — Xiangshan Gang — to the north, across which lie Ningbo's Yinzhou District and Fenghua, and Sanmen Bay to the south and west. Its shape is conventionally described in Chinese sources as surrounded by sea on three sides and joined to the land by a single line, the narrow neck of the peninsula. The coastline figure alone explains the paper's character: 925 kilometres, roughly one eighth of the entire coastline of Zhejiang Province, divided between about 349 kilometres of mainland shore and some 576 kilometres of island shore. The county seat at Dancheng administers a population scattered across peninsula towns, harbour settlements and inhabited islands, of which Nantian Island, south of Shipu, is the largest island in Ningbo. A county newspaper here is therefore also, unavoidably, a maritime newspaper: tides, harbour works, typhoon tracks, ferry services and island water and power supply are not specialist supplements but front-page service information on which readers' safety and incomes depend.

The elephant mountain and a Tang-dynasty county

The county's name, and by extension the newspaper's, comes from its landscape. Xiangshan means 'Elephant Mountain', after a mountain in the northwest of the county said to be shaped like a crouching elephant. The county itself was established in the Tang dynasty — local chronology places its early administration in the same Tang-era ordering of the Mingzhou coast under which Shipu appears as a village in 706, in the Shenlong era. Across the centuries that followed, Xiangshan remained a coastal county of the Ningbo prefecture, at times divided — in 1912 its southern island territory was briefly made a separate Nantian County before being reabsorbed — and in 1983, when the city-administering-county system was introduced at Ningbo, Xiangshan passed with five neighbouring counties into the jurisdiction of Ningbo City, where it remains one of the municipality's two counties alongside Ninghai. That administrative continuity matters for the paper: unlike suburban districts assembled from farmland in living memory, Xiangshan has been a named county with its own seat, chronicles and maritime identity for well over a thousand years, and its county paper inherits that accumulated local memory as raw material.

Shipu and the fishing civilisation

The heart of the county's economy and culture is fishing, and its capital is Shipu. The town at the southern end of the peninsula, described as an important town of the central Zhejiang sea route, is a famous historical and cultural town of China, one of the country's central fishing ports and a national second-class open port. Its harbour — a crescent-shaped, sheltered anchorage described in local accounts as able to berth ten thousand fishing boats — is counted among China's great fishing ports, and its old town, built up the hillside above the port in the Ming era pattern of harbour streets, preserves the densest fishing-port streetscape on this coast. The heritage is far older than the port buildings. In 2010 the Ministry of Culture ratified the Xiangshan marine fishing culture ecological protection zone, recognising the county as a typical, well-preserved representation of Chinese oceanic fisheries culture, and exhibitions of Xiangshan material at the National Library presented a fishery history reaching back some 6,000 years. For Xiangshan Daily, fishing is not a beat among others; it is the county's founding story, its largest traditional industry and its public identity, celebrated each year in the China Fishing Festival at Shipu.

The moratorium, the festival and the modern fleet

Modern Xiangshan fishing journalism turns on a paradox the county itself helped create. As early as 1995, Xiangshan fishermen, foreseeing the exhaustion of fishery resources, proposed the concept of a summer fishing closed season; the proposal was approved by the State Council, and a summer moratorium — observed in later years from mid-May into September — became national practice on this coast. The county that lived most completely from the sea was thus among the first to argue for resting it, and the annual rhythm of the moratorium now structures the local news year: the fleet's departure when the season opens, with its harbour ceremonies and safety inspections; the quiet months of boat repair, net mending and seafood processing; and the management of aquaculture, which fills the gap the wild catch leaves. Around that working rhythm sits celebration: the China Fishing Festival, held at Shipu and counted by local accounts to its twenty-fifth edition in 2022, turns the opening of the season into a national media event, with the county paper as its home chronicler. Coverage of marine ecological protection, of the national marine ecological civilisation demonstration work for which Xiangshan has been honoured, and of fishermen's transition into tourism, aquaculture and services completes a fisheries agenda no inland county paper ever has to write.

From fishing county to film county

Xiangshan's second modern identity arrived from an unexpected direction. The Xiangshan Film and Television City, built in the county and covering over a thousand mu of sets and streets, is described in local and industry accounts as China's first live-action film theme park and one of the country's top ten film and television shooting bases. Historical dramas shot among its palace and old-street sets made the words 'Xiangshan' familiar to television audiences who had never heard of Shipu harbour, and production crews became a visible seasonal population in the county. A county newspaper thus reports for two economies that share one coastline: the maritime economy of boats, harbours, seafood markets — including the China Aquatic Products City at Shipu — and island tourism around Songlan Mountain's beaches, Tantoushan Island and the Yushan archipelago, described locally as Asia's first fishing ground; and the screen economy of studios, crews and film-induced tourism. Private enterprise adds a third strand: the county has produced nationally listed companies and, by Hurun's 2020 accounting, a striking crop of wealthy entrepreneurs for a county of its size, notably in new energy. Joining those stories together — in land use, jobs, infrastructure and county promotion — is everyday work for the county paper.

Xiangshan Daily in Zhejiang's county-paper tradition

Zhejiang has one of China's strongest traditions of county-level newspapers, and Xiangshan Daily belongs squarely to it. In the Chinese party-paper system, papers are organised by administrative level — national, provincial, prefectural, and county or district — and the paper at each level serves as the official organ of the party committee at that level, publishing its decisions alongside news. The county tier endured a severe national test in the press rectification of 2003, when county-level committees were in principle no longer to run their own publications and many county papers across China closed. In Zhejiang the form survived in reorganised shapes — neighbouring counties saw their papers revived, grouped with prefectural press groups or rebuilt as local publications — because the function proved irreplaceable. Only a Xiangshan paper reports in full the county's harbour projects, island-village works, fishing-fleet administration and school and clinic news. Ningbo Daily, the prefectural organ, covers the county from the city; national media arrive only for the festival or a typhoon. Xiangshan Daily is the standing, daily witness, and its organ status means its pages also carry the county committee's authoritative texts.

The converged-media era on the peninsula

Like every county paper in China, Xiangshan Daily now operates inside the converged-media transformation. National policy from the August 2014 guiding opinion on convergent development onward pushed traditional and emerging media to develop as one; at the National Propaganda and Ideological Work Conference in August 2018, building county-level converged media centres was made an explicit national task, to better guide and serve the public, and by August 2022 some 2,585 such centres were operating nationwide, integrating county newspapers with radio, television, websites and mobile services. On a peninsula, the practical case is vivid. A typhoon landfall warning, a harbour closure, a suspended island ferry or a red-tide notice reaches a fishing family faster by phone alert from the county's converged platforms than by any printed edition — and at sea, speed is safety. Print retains the complementary role: the formal county record, the archive of decisions and the edition read in government offices, schools and village reading rooms. Convergence, for a maritime county paper, is therefore not a fashion but an extension of its oldest duty, which is to connect a scattered, sea-divided population to its county seat.

What the paper covers, day to day

The daily agenda of Xiangshan Daily follows from the county itself. County party and government work leads, as in every Chinese county organ: committee meetings, policy implementation, development targets and campaigns. Around that core sits the maritime service journalism of the peninsula: fishing-season openings and moratorium enforcement; harbour, bridge and road building — including the Xiangshan Harbor Bridge, opened in 2012, which tied the county far more tightly to metropolitan Ningbo; aquaculture and seafood-market news; shipbuilding and marine equipment; film-city productions and tourism seasons at Songlan Mountain, Shipu old town and the island resorts; education, health and pension provision across peninsula and island settlements; and typhoon, storm-surge and maritime-safety coverage through the summer and autumn. Cultural reporting draws on the fishing civilisation itself — harbour customs, boat and temple festivals, the crafts of net, sail and seafood cuisine — and on the county's presentation of itself as a national model of marine ecological culture. It is a broad brief for a small newsroom, and precisely the brief no other title is positioned to fill.

How to read Xiangshan Daily as a source

For outside researchers, Xiangshan Daily is best used as a primary source on how a Chinese maritime county governs and presents itself. Its official content reliably records county policy, appointments, project approvals and campaign priorities in Xiangshan's own terms, while its local reporting preserves detail — fleet movements, harbour works, island projects, festival organisation, harvests of the sea as locally announced — that rarely survives into provincial or national coverage except in disaster. Two cautions apply, as with all Chinese party papers. First, it is an organ of the county party committee, so its framing of contested issues — a harbour development dispute, a fishing-quota grievance, an ecological enforcement action — follows the official line, and its silences can be as significant as its stories. Second, paper-specific facts circulating on the open web about titles at this level — founding dates, circulation figures, staffing — are often unsourced, and this profile deliberately asserts none of them. Read with those cautions, the paper remains what its county made it: the daily written record of Ningbo's sea-girt peninsula county, where the news begins with the tide.