NANFANG WEEKEND

[Nanfang zhoumo]

Newspaper

The Nanfang Weekend is the weekend edition of the Nanfang Daily newspaper published by the Nanfang Daily News Group based in Guangzhou. The Nanfang Daily is the Party organ newspaper of the Guangdong Province Party Propaganda Committee and therefore has little leeway to avoid political propaganda reporting relating to politicians’ speeches, Party meetings and so on. The Nanfang Weekend, however, emerged as a force in the media in the early 1990s, offering a solution to the problem facing all newspaper editors as to how to fulfil their political obligations to the Party on the one hand while producing lively, interesting copy on the other.An effectual division of labour between the daily and the weekend edition was the way out of this double bind.

The Nanfang Weekend was thereby able to focus on often sensationalist human interest stories dealing with crime, corruption scandals, revelations about past leaders such as Mao Zedong, and the negative social consequences of the reform period, such as unemployment, worker exploitation and so on. The paper was an immediate success in Guangdong and soon grew to a national circulation of several million, making it one of the most popular and widely read newspapers in China in the 1990s. It was soon copied nationally by other newspapers, as the number of weekend editions rose from fewer than twenty in 1990 to more than 400 in 1994.

See also: evening newspapers and weekend editions; journalism; newspapers; state control of media; Yangcheng Evening News

Zhao, Y. (1998). Media, Market, and Democracy in China: Between the Party Line and the Bottom Line. Chicago: University of Illinois.