About Zhoushan News Net

Zhoushan News Net

Zhoushan News Net is the official online news portal serving Zhoushan, a prefecture-level city in eastern Zhejiang Province, China. Published in Chinese, it carries local government, economy, society, livelihood and culture news for Zhoushan and its subordinate districts and counties, and it is the city's dedicated local news website, produced by Zhoushan's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting group. It is distinct from the print Zhoushan Daily newspaper, whose reporting it carries alongside online-first local coverage and local government service information.

Zhoushan is unique in China: the country's only prefecture-level city made up entirely of an archipelago — some 1,390 islands at the mouth of Hangzhou Bay. Its portal reports on a sea city of about 1.16 million people whose economy is written in water: the world's busiest cargo port by tonnage, one of the world's great fishing ports, and the Buddhist mountain of Putuo that draws pilgrims from across East Asia.

The portal and its place in Zhoushan media

Zhoushan News Net is the web flagship of the city's converged media centre, the merged municipal newspaper and broadcasting organisation. It publishes the newsroom's reporting continuously online, together with official announcements and government service information, as Zhoushan's dedicated local news website and the standing digital record of the prefecture's public affairs. Zhoushan's official web presence — Zhoushan Net — is listed as the city's local news and information site, the address islanders bookmark for city affairs.

It is distinct from Zhoushan Daily, the centre's print newspaper, whose journalism it carries and extends with online-first stories, photography, video and service pages. The group's outward face includes an English portal presented by Zhoushan Daily with China Daily, launched on 17 July 2018 and backed by the publicity department of the CPC Zhoushan Municipal Committee, with sections for news, the pilot free trade zone, travel, video, culture and services — built to tell Zhoushan's stories to the outside world.

The Chinese-language service operates as a licensed internet news information service under the framework administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China. For an archipelago readership, the portal's practical role is unusually concrete: ferry sailings, typhoon warnings, fishing seasons and port news are services islanders plan their days around.

The city of a thousand islands

Zhoushan consists of an archipelago at the southern mouth of Hangzhou Bay, off Ningbo, facing Shanghai to the north and the East China Sea to the east. The archipelago comprises about 1,390 islands and 3,306 reefs — the largest archipelago in China — of which around a hundred are inhabited all year round. The prefecture's land area is about 1,378 square kilometres within a total area of some 22,200 square kilometres, most of it sea.

Zhoushan Island itself, at 502.65 square kilometres, is China's fourth-largest island and holds the city proper; the prefecture recorded a population of 1,157,817 in the 2020 census, with 882,932 of them in the built-up districts of Dinghai and Putuo. Zhoushan was promoted to a prefecture-level city on 27 January 1987, its ports were opened to foreign ships the same spring, and in 1988 it became a coastal economic open zone. On 8 July 2011 the central government approved the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area, a state-level new area built around the marine economy.

Two districts and two island counties

Zhoushan administers two districts and two counties: Dinghai District, the municipal seat, on the western part of Zhoushan Island; Putuo District, covering the island's east and islands beyond, including Mount Putuo and Zhujiajian; Daishan County, on and around Daishan Island to the north; and Shengsi County, the northernmost island chain, closer to Shanghai than to the city seat.

Governing an archipelago means the portal's coverage is organised by islands as much as by topics. News from Shengsi's fishing villages, Daishan's shipyards and the small inhabited islands — where passenger, cargo and postal services have been integrated through "land and water linkage" networks with island service stations — all feeds one city service, knitting a scattered maritime territory into a single readership.

The port: Ningbo-Zhoushan and the free trade zone

Zhoushan's harbour is its fortune. The Zhoushan port area forms part of Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, which possesses the world's largest cargo handling capacity, and the islands hold deep-water berths for the largest bulk carriers and tankers afloat — including the Dapukou container terminal in the Jintang port area, from which new Belt and Road shipping routes are regularly reported. Ship repair is a parallel industry: Zhoushan yards have serviced the largest-tonnage vessels in the world, including a 400,000-deadweight-ton bulk carrier retrofitted with rotor sails.

Above the port sits policy: the Zhoushan Archipelago New Area and the China (Zhejiang) Pilot Free Trade Zone, whose Zhoushan sections specialise in oil and gas storage, bunkering and bulk commodities. The portal's economy coverage is therefore maritime to its core — throughput figures, new routes, car exports through the terminals, free-trade-zone measures and the oil-storage islands are its stock market page.

Shenjiamen and the fishing economy

Before the container cranes, there was fish. Zhoushan is China's largest centre for seafood production, processing and selling, set in one of the world's noted fishing grounds at the meeting of currents off the Yangtze mouth. Shenjiamen Fishing Port, in Putuo District, is counted one of the world's three largest fishing ports, and its night-time waterfront — boats, markets and seafood restaurants — is the city's living emblem.

The fishing calendar structures local news: the summer fishing moratorium and the autumn fleet departure, catches and seafood prices, aquaculture on the outer islands and the processing trade. The portal covers the fleet as other cities cover factories — as the prefecture's founding industry, still feeding thousands of island families in Daishan, Shengsi and the Zhoushan Island ports.

Mount Putuo and island tourism

Putuo Mountain, an island in Putuo District, is one of China's four great Buddhist mountains, sacred to Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, with great temples including Puji and Fayu receiving pilgrims throughout the year. Together with Zhujiajian's beaches and international sand sculpture festival, the Shengsi islands — China's only national-level island scenic area — Taohua Island and Dongji, the easternmost inhabited islands, tourism is the prefecture's third pillar.

Visitor numbers make regular news: Putuo Mountain and Zhujiajian together received more than half a million visitors over a single National Day holiday period in a recent year, with tourism revenue above 400 million yuan. The portal's travel coverage — ferry capacity, scenic-area bookings, festivals such as the Huazhao flower festival, and new vessels like the ro-ro ferries and island cruise boats it reports — serves residents and the tourism trade at once.

Bridges, ferries and island transport

An archipelago city's transport news is existential. The Zhoushan cross-sea bridge network links Zhoushan Island to Ningbo on the mainland, ending the islands' dependence on ferries for road traffic, while ferries remain the lifeline between islands — every inhabited island has its terminals, and new routes, such as the luxury passenger vessel service between Daishan and Shengsi, are reported as major civic events. Zhoushan Putuoshan Airport, on Zhujiajian Island, provides air links; the islands still have no railway station of their own, with travellers routing through Ningbo.

The portal folds this into daily service information: sailing schedules and cancellations, typhoon-season disruptions, bridge traffic and the integrated passenger-cargo-postal routes that now carry island farm produce — tomatoes from Liuheng, shrimp from Ant Island, oranges from Taohua — off the small islands to national markets.

What the portal publishes

Day to day, Zhoushan News Net publishes the full range of a prefecture news service with a maritime accent: municipal government and party affairs, policy announcements and official notices; port, shipping, ship-repair and free-trade-zone news; fisheries and seafood market coverage; society and livelihood reporting from the island districts and counties; culture and tourism news from Mount Putuo and the scenic islands; and marine weather and safety information that coastal readers treat as essential.

It also carries the service information residents use — recruitment and examination notices, ferry and road information, and announcements from city departments — and extends the converged media centre's newspaper and broadcast reporting with online-first updates through the day, in the pattern of China's merged prefecture media groups.

Digital services, licensing and readership

Like other Chinese prefecture portals, Zhoushan News Net operates within the national licensing system for internet news information services, administered by the Cyberspace Administration of China, which governs which organisations may gather and publish news online. Its authority rests on that licence and on its place inside the official municipal media group.

Its readers are the archipelago's own people — Dinghai and Putuo city dwellers, Daishan and Shengsi islanders, fishing and port families, and Zhoushan people across the Yangtze Delta — joined, through the group's English portal, by foreign readers following the free trade zone and the islands. In that role — noticeboard, newsroom and archive in one — Zhoushan News Net is the standing digital record of China's thousand-island city.