About Xiangtan Television

Xiangtan Television

Overview

Xiangtan Television (Chinese: 湘潭电视台) is the municipal television station of Xiangtan, a prefecture-level city in central Hunan, operated by the Xiangtan radio and television broadcaster as part of the city's media centre. Its flagship comprehensive channel, on air since 1 July 1985, carries local news, livelihood and cultural programming in Mandarin for the prefecture. The broadcaster is the official voice of the Xiangtan municipal party committee and people's government, serving the city and surrounding areas of Xiangtan.

Xiangtan punches far above its size in Chinese history. Its prefecture administers Shaoshan, the birthplace of Mao Zedong, and it was the home prefecture of the painter Qi Baishi. Its television station therefore works with an inheritance few prefecture broadcasters can match: the most sensitive and significant of red-heritage assignments, a major artistic legacy, and the daily affairs of a steel and equipment-manufacturing city inside the Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan city cluster.

Radio first: 1960 to 1984

Xiangtan broadcasting began with radio. In 1960 the municipal party committee and people's committee decided to build Xiangtan People's Radio Station on the foundation of the wired broadcasting station at Guliang Lane on Yuhu Road, and the station began broadcasting on 1 May 1960. The first life of the station was short: in September 1962, following a State Council requirement to adjust broadcasting nationally, it closed, on 20 September 1962.

In September 1968 the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee approved the re-establishment of the station at Hejiashan, outside the city. In its restored early years it mainly relayed China National Radio; from March 1972 it began producing its own programmes. In 1975 the station moved to Wangshahu. Later improvements included the 1993 relocation of its medium-wave transmitting tower from Shaoshan West Road to Xiangyuan Village in Changcheng Township to improve coverage, and the launch that year of a second radio frequency, the economic station — the ancestor of today's traffic service.

Television arrives: 1985

On 21 August 1984, the local publicity and technical bureaus of the Ministry of Radio, Film and Television approved the Xiangtan municipal government's application to establish Xiangtan Television. Test broadcasts began on 1 May 1985, and on 1 July 1985 the station formally opened on Channel 6, transmitted from the roof of the nine-storey Light Industry Commercial Building. The station was supervised by the municipal radio and television bureau and funded by the city on a partial-subsidy basis.

A permanent home followed. In August 1987 the city began preparing a new site for the television station, and in 1990 the new premises were completed at 28 Donghu Road. The comprehensive channel that traces its launch to 1 July 1985 remains the broadcaster's flagship today — one of the long continuously running prefecture television services in Hunan.

Cable, merger and the media group

Xiangtan Cable Television was founded in 1991. Besides its own channel, it delivered China Central Television and Hunan provincial channels to subscribers across the city. In 1999 the television station and the cable station were substantially merged, their internal structure reorganised into a television news centre, a social education centre and a technical transmission centre, while both call signs were retained. In 2000 the two were formally combined as the new Xiangtan Television, and the former cable operation took part in forming the station's urban channel.

In 2005 the Xiangtan Broadcasting Centre was completed on Furong Road, and both the radio and television stations moved in. In 2010 they were merged to form the Xiangtan Radio and Television Media Group. The same year, Xiangtan Television joined the broadcasters of Changsha and Zhuzhou to create Jiali Shopping — described as mainland China's first professional television shopping channel, a notable experiment by three neighbouring prefecture broadcasters.

Channels today, and a closed channel remembered

The broadcaster's television service today centres on the comprehensive channel, broadcasting since 1985 with news, current affairs and feature programming for Xiangtan and its surrounding area. Digitisation came in 2020, when Xiangtan Radio and Television closed its terrestrial analogue television channel and converted to digital transmission.

The station's second television service belongs to its past. The public channel, whose lineage ran from the cable station's comprehensive service of 1991 through the urban channel formed at the 2000 merger, ended on 1 February 2024. Its closure reflects the nationwide consolidation of prefecture television, in which second channels established in the cable era have been wound down as audiences move to digital and mobile platforms — leaving the comprehensive channel, as in 1985, to carry the station's whole television remit.

Radio and new media

Television sits within a wider Xiangtan broadcaster. Its radio arm runs two frequencies: the news comprehensive service on FM 88.2 MHz, and the traffic and emergency broadcasting service on FM 104.2 MHz, the descendant of the economic station launched in 1993. Radio and television together give the municipal broadcaster coverage of both the living room and the car in a prefecture closely tied into the Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan commuting region.

The broadcaster's new media presence includes the Xiangtan Media Network website, the WeChat public account "Here is Xiangtan," the Sina Weibo account of its FM 104.2 traffic service, and the "Beautiful Xiangtan" mobile app. Through these platforms the station's newsroom publishes beyond broadcast hours, in the converged pattern now standard for Chinese prefecture media.

Shaoshan and the red heritage remit

Xiangtan administers Shaoshan, the county-level city that was the hometown of Mao Zedong, who was born there in 1893. Shaoshan is one of China's most visited political pilgrimage sites, drawing large numbers of visitors to Mao's former residence and memorial museum. Coverage of Shaoshan — its commemorations, anniversaries and visitor economy — is the most distinctive standing assignment in Xiangtan Television's news diary, and one it shares with no other prefecture station.

The prefecture's cultural inheritance also includes Qi Baishi, the master of Chinese ink painting, who was born in Xiangtan in 1864 and whose former residence is preserved there. Between Shaoshan's red heritage and Qi Baishi's artistic legacy, the station's cultural programming draws on two of the most recognised names in modern Chinese history.

A steel city in a three-city cluster

Modern Xiangtan is an industrial city on the Xiang River. It is a base for steel — the home of Xiangtan Steel — and for electrical and equipment manufacturing, and it hosts Xiangtan University, founded in 1958. The city is one corner of the Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan cluster, Hunan's urban core, whose integration into a single metropolitan economy is a standing theme of regional policy and of the station's news.

Local products carry the city's name nationally: Xiangtan lotus seeds are a noted Hunan specialty. Industry, the university, cluster integration and the prefecture's farm output together make up the economic beat that the comprehensive channel covers alongside its heritage programming.

Why Xiangtan Television matters

Xiangtan Television matters because its prefecture concentrates an unusual share of modern China's story. The broadcaster that began as a radio station in 1960 and opened its television service on Channel 6 in 1985 now speaks for the city of Shaoshan and Qi Baishi, of steelworks and a major university, inside Hunan's three-city metropolitan heartland.

Its history also traces the whole arc of Chinese prefecture broadcasting in miniature: wired-station radio, closure and restoration, a television launch in the reform era, a cable sibling, merger, a media group, a pioneering joint shopping channel, digital conversion in 2020 and channel consolidation in 2024. Through every reorganisation, the comprehensive channel launched on 1 July 1985 has remained at the centre of Xiangtan's screen life.