About Yingkou Television

Yingkou Television

Overview

Yingkou Television (Chinese: 营口电视台) is the municipal television station of Yingkou, a port city in central Liaoning province on the shore of Liaodong Bay. Founded in 1984, it operates today as part of Yingkou Radio and Television Station, the city's broadcaster, whose official website is ykrtv.com and whose news output also appears through the Yingkou News Web.

The station is a self-contained prefecture broadcaster of the classic Chinese type: its own building, its own production departments, and — since 2004 — three television channels of its own, carrying news, social-life and arts programming in Mandarin to the city and the counties around it. Its home city gives its journalism a distinctive flavour: Yingkou was one of the first treaty ports in northeast China, and the modern port at Bayuquan keeps trade and the sea at the centre of local life.

Founded in 1984

Yingkou Television was founded in 1984, a date recorded in the National Radio and Television Administration's listings of Chinese broadcasters. The early 1980s were the founding decade of Chinese city television, when prefecture-level stations were established across the country under the policy of running television at four levels — central, provincial, municipal and county. Yingkou's station belongs to that generation.

The station's own published profile describes the institution it became: premises with a total building area of 2,538 square metres, a staff of 130, and fourteen departments, transmitting 34 sets of programmes. From a handful of columns at its founding, it grew into a station with more than ten regular self-produced programme strands and, in its own assessment, the complete independent capability to produce its programmes.

A broadcasting inheritance from the radio era

Yingkou's broadcasting history is older than its television station. A Yingkou People's Radio once served the city in the first years of the People's Republic; in 1950 that station was abolished and its entire staff and equipment were transferred to Benxi, where they formed the basis of Benxi People's Radio, which made its first trial broadcast on 25 December 1950. The episode, preserved in Benxi's broadcasting history, is a reminder that Yingkou stood in the first rank of Liaoning's early radio cities before television arrived.

Television, when it came in 1984, therefore renewed a broadcasting tradition rather than starting one from nothing — and the later creation of Yingkou Radio and Television Station brought the city's radio and television identities together in the modern merged form familiar across China.

Three channels of its own from 2004

From 2004, Yingkou Television began operating three self-run channels. The News Comprehensive Channel is the flagship, carrying the city's news and current affairs. The Social Life Channel addresses community and everyday-life subjects. The Arts and Film Channel carries cultural, arts and drama programming. Together they give the prefecture a general-news service, a livelihood service and an entertainment service under one roof.

The three-channel structure marked the station's maturity: a single-channel relay-and-news operation had become a small network able to segment its audience, with the flagship retaining the municipal news agenda and the sister channels free to serve social life and the arts.

The programme columns

The station's identity lives in its columns. Its published profile lists more than ten fixed self-produced strands, headed by Yingkou News, the flagship bulletin, and including Focus, a current-affairs strand; Bincheng Report, named for Yingkou's identity as a coastal city; Yingkou Interview; and Politics and Law Online, covering legal and public-security affairs.

The wider list shows the range of a prefecture station's week: Yingkou Stories, Happy Community Tour, Golden Homeland, Focus on Government Conduct, The Power of Voice, Children Travelling the World, New Countryside and Walking Together in Sunshine — a mixture of community reporting, rural coverage, children's and family content, public-supervision formats and human-interest features. It is the standard grammar of Chinese local television, spoken with a Yingkou accent.

How the programmes are made

The station's profile also records its technical base. Post-production uses a non-linear editing network, and its computer-controlled broadcast rooms use hard-disk playout — the digital workflow that replaced tape-based production in Chinese city stations during the 2000s. Combined with its fourteen departments and 130 staff, the description is of a compact but complete production house: news gathering, editing, studio production and transmission all in-house.

That completeness matters at prefecture level, where a station's credibility rests on covering its own city with its own crews rather than filling the schedule with relays. Yingkou's investment in self-production — three channels, ten-plus columns, its own playout systems — is the practical foundation of its local remit.

The treaty-port city it serves

Yingkou began to develop as a river port in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, near the mouth of the Daliao River, some eighteen kilometres from the mouth of the Liao, replacing the older upstream ports of Niuzhuang and Tianzhuangtai. The port was used from 1861 onward as a treaty port, and in the late nineteenth century Yingkou grew into a major port and the principal outlet for goods from Manchuria, exporting great quantities of soybeans and manufacturing bean cake and vegetable oil, with a large foreign — mainly Japanese — trading community.

That history survives in the old port quarter along the river, and it gives the station's heritage and city coverage a subject few inland stations possess: a northeastern city whose modern existence began with foreign trade. Programmes about the port's past and the city's old streets draw on a documented, Britannica-recorded history of Yingkou as the Liao valley's window on the sea.

Port, industry and the Bayuquan expansion

Contemporary Yingkou remains a working port city. A new seaport opened at Bayuquan in 1986, some forty kilometres south of the city centre, and the city was designated one of China's "open" cities in 1985 under the liberalised economic policy of inviting foreign trade and investment. Its industries include light manufacturing, cotton mills and knitting factories, food processing and canneries, paper mills, an engineering sector specialising in machine tools, and a large-scale oil refinery; the prefecture is also known for magnesium production, and the area is a fishing base with large evaporating pans for sea salt.

Port throughput, coastal industry and the Bayuquan district's growth form the economic spine of the station's news agenda — the modern continuation of the treaty-port story, in which Yingkou's prosperity has always arrived by water.

Salt, springs and coastal life

Beyond the docks, the prefecture offers the station a gentler register: the hot springs of Xiongyue, the beaches and hills of the Liaodong Bay shore, and the agricultural counties of the Liao plain. Tourism and lifestyle coverage — much of it carried on the Social Life and Arts and Film channels — presents this Yingkou to its own residents and to visitors from across Liaoning.

The fishing fleet and the salt pans, both recorded features of the city's economy, tie the modern coverage back to the oldest Yingkou industries of all, older than the treaty port itself.

Why Yingkou Television matters

Yingkou Television matters as a complete specimen of the Chinese prefecture station: founded in the great 1980s wave, grown from a few columns into a three-channel, self-producing broadcaster, and rooted in a city whose broadcasting tradition reaches back to a radio station of 1950. Its documented profile — 130 staff, fourteen departments, three channels, ten-plus home-made columns — quantifies what local television means in a mid-sized Chinese port city.

Above all, it is the screen of a port. From the treaty-port history of the Liao River mouth to the container berths of Bayuquan, Yingkou's story is one of trade and the sea, and its television station tells that story, in Mandarin, to the city that lives it.