Duowei News

» see dwnews.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

For the last thirteen years of its life, Duowei News was edited in Beijing and unreachable from Beijing. The site was blocked inside mainland China while its newsroom sat in a Beijing office park, filing Chinese-language political coverage for readers in Taiwan and in the diaspora, who were the ones who could actually load the page.

It started a long way from there. Ho Pin founded it on 11 January 1999 in New York, under the name Chinese News Net, at chinesenewsnet.com. He had worked for a state-run paper in China and left after 1989, and what he built was a Chinese-language political news operation written outside the country it was about. The dwnews.com domain came later, registered in June 2004, and that is the address most readers remember.

What made it worth reading was Party plumbing. Duowei covered the internal arrangement of the Chinese Communist Party at a level of detail nobody inside the mainland could publish, and twice it got the big one right: the lineups of the 16th and 17th Party congresses appeared on the site before they were announced, in 2002 and again in 2007. There was a print sibling as well, Duowei Monthly, in an international edition and a Taiwan one.

The distance on this grave is the script. Every page was in Chinese and I do not read a character of it, so even if the address had reached me on a Turkish dial-up line in 1999 the page would have come up as a grid of empty boxes. A home Windows install here shipped without East Asian fonts, and you had to go and install language support before the characters resolved at all. I am reading this one entirely in translation, which is the honest position for a site that was never addressed to me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it published ~

Duowei's reputation moved over its lifetime, and the sources disagree with each other because the site did not stay the same thing. In 2013 Jason Q. Ng, writing for China Digital Times and the Citizen Lab, put it down as critical of the mainland government. By 2018 Radio France Internationale was describing it as pro-Beijing and carrying Party messaging. A Hoover Institution report files it with the independent Chinese-language outlets in the United States that pro-Beijing businessmen ended up owning.

Both readings hold for a site that carried leaks from more than one faction. That was the value of it: people read Duowei to work out what was being said to whom, and a story appearing there was itself information about who wanted it out. The work was not all factional either. In 2019 it took a SOPA award for photography, on an investigation into water pollution.

~ the sale ~

In 2009 the site was sold to Yu Pun-hoi, a Hong Kong businessman with a pro-Beijing reputation, and the headquarters moved to Beijing. Ownership ran through China Digital Information and then Sino-I Technology, under Nan Hai Corporation. Ho Pin went off and started Mingjing News. Yu founded HK01 in Hong Kong in 2015, and that detail matters for how this one ends.

The end came in two parts. The editorial department was dissolved at the end of 2021, with the Taiwan office closing in the same stretch, so by 2022 the brand was publishing without much of a newsroom behind it. Then on 26 April 2022, at four in the afternoon Hong Kong time, the website and the app stopped. The notice said Duowei was bidding farewell to its readers because of adjustments to the internal news business. Of the fifty to sixty people at the Beijing headquarters, a few moved over to HK01 and the rest were let go.

Nan Hai Corporation had lost more than three billion Hong Kong dollars in 2021, around 382 million US, and people who worked there told the Taiwanese press that this was the reason rather than anything editorial. Outside commentators read it as one more piece of political tidying before the 20th Party congress. Both explanations can stand at once, because a loss-making property gets closed faster when nobody senior wants to defend it.

~ where the address goes now ~

The dwnews.com domain still resolves. Requesting it returns a redirect straight to hk01.com, and the redirect carries a query string that marks the traffic: utm_source=dwnews, utm_medium=referral. Twenty three years of Chinese political reporting now work as a referral channel in the owner's analytics for a different website.

That is tidy bookkeeping and it is the last thing the brand does. The archive is gone from the live web and the app is gone from the stores. What is left under the name is a redirect with a tracking tag on it.

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