Xinhua Sports

What is Xinhua Sports?

Xinhua Sports (新华体育) is the sports service of the Xinhua News Agency, published as a channel of the agency’s news.cn platform and described on that channel’s own masthead as a communication and service platform for China’s sports industry.^[3] It is an agency service rather than a consumer title: its principal output is copy, pictures and video supplied to other publishers, and a public-facing channel sits alongside that.

The agency behind it describes itself on its own basic-information page as “中国国家通讯社和世界性通讯社” — China’s state news agency and a world news agency.^[1] That is the agency’s characterisation of itself and is reported here with that attribution. The same page names the agency’s current head and editor-in-chief and sets out its operating scale.^[1]

A separate listed company carries much of the agency’s online publishing. Xinhuanet Co., Ltd. states on its corporate page that it is the news information service portal sponsored by the Xinhua News Agency and the main transmission platform for the agency’s all-media products, that the agency holds 51 per cent of its shares, and that it listed on 28 October 2016 under stock code 603888.^[4]

What does Xinhua Sports cover?

The sports channel carries standing sections for competitive sport, youth athletics, esports, mass fitness, ice and snow sport, football, go and marathon running.^[3] That range reflects an agency remit rather than a market one: alongside professional football and basketball it covers the school-and-youth pathway and mass-participation running, which a commercial sports title has less reason to staff.

Because it is an agency, its sports output also travels well beyond its own channel. The agency’s basic-information page states that it supplies text, pictures, graphics, audio and video around the clock in 15 languages to more than 8,000 news-organisation clients, which is the route by which Chinese results and competition reporting reaches many domestic and foreign publications.^[1] Wikipedia’s background entry describes the agency in the same terms as a state-run wire service.^[5]

How large is Xinhua Sports’s audience?

No measured audience figure specific to the sports service could be retrieved, from the agency or from an independent measurement body, and no Chinese online audience currency comparable to a published Comscore or Médiamétrie panel could be retrieved for it. What can be given is the scale of the agency that produces it, from the agency’s own published description.

That page states that the agency operates 31 branch bureaus and 10 sub-bureaus within China, together with 184 bureaus overseas including seven regional headquarters; that it publishes in 15 languages; and that it supplies more than 8,000 news-organisation clients.^[1] Those are distribution measures rather than audience measures, and they are the agency’s own figures.

For the online arm, the corporate page of Xinhuanet Co., Ltd. states that it operates 50 specialist channels and 31 local channels along with foreign-language and overseas operations.^[4] Again this is a count of services, not of readers.

Since when has Xinhua Sports existed?

The agency’s own history page records that it was established on 7 November 1931 at Ruijin in Jiangxi province as the Red China News Agency (红色中华通讯社), and that in January 1937, at Yan’an, it was renamed by a central decision, giving the abbreviated name by which it has been known since.^[2] Founding and renaming are different events and the agency’s own pages date them separately; this page keeps them apart. The same history page records that the agency began Japanese-language broadcasting on 3 December 1941 and English-language written transmission to readers abroad on 1 September 1944.^[2]

A founding date for the sports service as a distinct channel could not be retrieved from the agency’s own pages or from any other source retrieved for this page. The listed online arm that now carries the channel gives its own listing date as 28 October 2016.^[4] Wikipedia’s background entry on the agency carries the 1931 and 1937 dates as well.^[5]

Why does Xinhua Sports matter in China’s sport?

Agency copy is the layer beneath much of what a reader sees elsewhere. Where a Chinese newspaper, portal or broadcaster reports a result, a selection or a federation decision without its own reporter present, the wire service is usually the source, and the agency states that it supplies more than 8,000 news-organisation clients.^[1] For anyone tracing a Chinese sports fact back to its first published form, this is frequently where the trail ends.

Its remit also covers ground that commercial sports media in China cover thinly. The channel’s standing sections include youth athletics, mass fitness, ice and snow sport and marathon running alongside professional football and basketball.^[3] The school and provincial pathway, which is the structural spine of Chinese competitive sport, is reported through that kind of service rather than through match coverage.

Its institutional position is a structural fact worth stating plainly: it is the state news agency by its own description, and its online arm is majority-held by the agency and listed on a domestic exchange.^[1][4] Statements it carries about Chinese sport are read with that in mind, in the same way that a public broadcaster’s charter or a state wire service’s statute is read elsewhere.