About Zhiyin Manke

Zhiyin Manke

Zhiyin Manke (Chinese: 知音漫客; pinyin: Zhīyīn Mànkè) is a comics magazine published in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, by Zhiyin Animation Co., Ltd., part of the Zhiyin Media Group. Founded on 1 January 2006, it serialised full-colour Chinese manhua in a large, sixteenmo format, sold at a uniform low price — five yuan for most of its life — and was read mainly by middle-school students across mainland China. From a first printing of 100,000 copies, it grew with extraordinary speed: by 2012 its monthly circulation had passed 5.2 million copies, making it China's largest comics magazine, and by 2015 monthly circulation exceeded seven million. It remains the outstanding example of a mainland Chinese print comics magazine built entirely around original domestic manhua, and its rise and later contraction mirror the rise of China's original comics industry and the subsequent migration of its readers online. Its ISSN is 2095-1272.

Founding in Wuhan in 2006

Zhiyin Manke was founded in Wuhan on 1 January 2006. Its parent was Zhiyin Media, the Wuhan-based group built around Zhiyin, the emotional-life magazine founded in Wuhan in 1985 whose monthly circulation had reached 6.36 million copies by 2008, ranking it among the largest general magazines in the world. The comics magazine's founder and first editor-in-chief was Zhu Jiajun, also known as Li Jing. The first edition printed 100,000 copies, and Zhu set the initial price at just two yuan a copy — a deliberately low entry price for a magazine aimed at school students. A Japanese scholarly study of the magazine notes that the Zhiyin brand's strength meant Zhiyin Manke was widely known from its launch, and sold in bookshops and newsstands across the whole country.

The second editor-in-chief was Chen Jing, known as Yinyin. According to the same scholarly research, Zhu Jiajun, under his pen name Li Jing, edited the magazine from its founding until 2014, after which Chen Jing took over and remained editor to the present day of that research.

Format: full-colour manhua at a uniform price

The magazine's formula distinguished it from the black-and-white world of Japanese manga magazines. Zhiyin Manke mainly published and serialised comics in sixteen-page full-colour format, in a large sixteenmo size, and the Japanese study describes it as an A4-format, all-colour comics magazine for both male and female teenage readers, whose contents were made up of original Chinese comics. Its contents combined the serialised comics themselves with column articles and the marginal features — side columns and foot columns — that framed the comics pages. The price settled at a uniform five yuan, the same everywhere, which reference accounts emphasise as part of its formula for mainland distribution.

Its readers were, in the main, middle-school students. That readership, together with the low price and the famous parent brand, gave the magazine a distribution reach that earlier Chinese comics magazines — many of them assembled around imported Japanese material in the 1990s — had never achieved with original domestic work.

The climb in frequency: monthly to weekly

Zhiyin Manke's publication rhythm accelerated as its sales grew, and the sequence is documented in detail. In 2007, Zhu Jiajun changed it to a semi-monthly; in October 2007 a second monthly issue was launched, taking monthly distribution to 240,000 copies, though the venture recorded an investment loss of 940,000 yuan that year. In October 2008 it became a ten-day magazine — three issues a month — at sixty-four pages per issue; monthly distribution reached 840,000 copies and the magazine recorded a profit of 2.6 million yuan.

In March 2009 monthly distribution reached 1.02 million copies, with each issue growing by about ten per cent, even as domestic and foreign periodicals were generally losing circulation in the financial crisis. In October 2009 the Zhiyin Group invested a further ten million yuan, and Zhiyin Manke became a weekly of eighty pages per issue, with revenue reaching twenty-eight million yuan. In little under four years it had gone from a monthly experiment to a full weekly comics magazine — a cadence previously associated, in East Asia, only with Japan's great shōnen weeklies.

China's leading comics magazine

The weekly era made Zhiyin Manke a publishing phenomenon. Monthly circulation reached 2.6 million copies in 2010. In 2012 monthly circulation broke through 5.2 million, making the magazine China's largest-circulation comics magazine and, by the ranking cited in Chinese reference accounts, the third largest in the world, behind only Japan's Weekly Shōnen Jump and Weekly Shōnen Magazine. In 2013 the figures grew again: Zhiyin Media achieved operating revenue of 579 million yuan, of which Zhiyin Manke's sales revenue was 196 million yuan, with a further 189 million yuan from other animation periodicals and books built on the magazine; its annual net profit exceeded fifty million yuan, its publication sales surpassed those of the flagship Zhiyin magazine itself and accounted for more than sixty per cent of Zhiyin Media's total revenue, and monthly circulation reached 6.5 million — China's first and, by the same ranking, the world's second. By the end of 2013 its cumulative distribution approached 1.6 billion copies.

In 2015 the magazine accounted for eighty per cent of comics magazine distribution in China, with monthly circulation exceeding seven million copies — the figure reference works carry as its peak circulation. A Wuhan school student's five-yuan weekly had become, for a time, one of the largest comics magazines on earth.

Content and editorial evolution

The magazine's contents changed as it grew. Scholarly research on its transformation records that at its founding in 2006 its line-up centred on gag comics, following the prevailing current of existing children's comics magazines, with artists commissioned by the editors to serialise humour work. From around 2008 the editorial policy shifted: the magazine reweighted its readership from boys towards a broader youth audience, and placed its emphasis on fantasy and other story-driven comics rather than gags. In parallel, contributions from female readers published in the magazine came to outnumber those from male readers. The magazine also operated on the classic anthology principle of reader power: series lived or died by popularity polling, with a work's survival determined by its standing in reader votes.

Among the best-known works associated with the magazine was the manhua adaptation of Battle Through the Heavens, the web novel by Tiancan Tudou. Authorised by Zhiyin Animation, the adaptation was drawn by cartoonists including Zhou Hongbin and Ren Xiang and serialised in Zhiyin Manke, where it won an enthusiastic following among readers — an early and influential example of the pipeline from Chinese web literature to print manhua that the magazine helped to build.

Place in China's original manhua industry

Zhiyin Manke's significance lies in what it proved. Chinese comics publishing in the 1990s had been dominated by imported and often pirated Japanese manga, and the first modern Chinese comics magazine of the era, Picture Book King of 1993, had published mainly Japanese manga with domestic work in support. Zhiyin Manke, by contrast, built the largest comics circulation in China on original Chinese manhua, in full colour, at a mass price. Its success demonstrated that a domestic anthology could sustain weekly publication, support a stable of serialised artists, and generate the largest share of a major media group's revenue — outcomes the Chinese industry had pursued since the government began backing comics and animation as a national industry.

Contraction in the online era and the move to semi-monthly

The same research that documents the magazine's rise documents its reversal. From about 2016, as the internet spread, readers drifted away from print. Zhiyin Manke's own ecosystem followed them: Manke Wang, the website established by Zhiyin Media, was a comics and animation information platform whose predecessor was the Zhiyin Manke magazine itself — described as a move by Zhiyin from paper to web, concentrating on the online distribution of comics. The print magazine, a weekly at its height, progressively slowed. A joint issue was launched in May 2020, and in December 2020 the magazine was revised back to a semi-monthly. Scholarly research confirms it was still being published continuously by the Hubei Zhiyin Media Group up to October 2023; reference listings subsequently recorded a further change in August 2025 to irregularly published special issues. The magazine that had outrun the financial crisis could not outrun the smartphone, but it has not disappeared: it survives in reduced form, and its name survives online.

Editors, publisher and identity

Zhiyin Manke is published by the magazine's editorial department within the Zhiyin Media Group, and is sponsored and distributed by Zhiyin Animation Co., Ltd. Its founder Zhu Jiajun, as Li Jing, was its first editor-in-chief, serving until 2014; Chen Jing, as Yinyin, succeeded him. Its registered identifiers — ISSN 2095-1272 and the Chinese periodical number CN 42-1776/J — place it in Hubei, reflecting its Wuhan base. In its home city it stood alongside the group's older flagship: where Zhiyin, founded in 1985, had made Wuhan a capital of Chinese magazine publishing for adult readers, Zhiyin Manke did the same for teenage comics readers a generation later.

Legacy

Zhiyin Manke's legacy is the demonstration effect of its peak years. Between 2006 and the mid-2010s it showed that original Chinese manhua could anchor a weekly, full-colour, nationally distributed magazine; that middle-school readers would sustain monthly circulations above seven million copies; and that a comics magazine could outsell and out-earn the famous general-interest title whose brand it borrowed. Its gag-to-fantasy editorial evolution traced the maturing tastes of China's first large generation of domestic comics readers, and its later contraction — joint issues, semi-monthly publication, irregular specials and the migration of its brand to the web — traced, with equal fidelity, the fate of print comics in the mobile internet age. In the history of Chinese magazines, it remains mainland China's leading print comics magazine of its era.