Pengcheng Daily vs. The Beijing News, June 5, 2008

Pengcheng Daily (彭城晚报) is a commercial evening newspaper run by the Xuzhou Daily. As in other cities with a long and glorious history (6,000 years, in this case), the paper uses an older name of the city of Xuzhou in its title. The Comprehensive Mirror for Aid in Government, written in the Song Dynasty, notes, "Pengzu, Zhuan Xu's great-great-grandson, reached the age of 767 at the end of the Shang Dynasty. His tomb still exists today. Hence the city is called Peng City" (Baidupedia link).

With just two days left before the gaokao, the college entrance exams, today's top headline reflects the anxiety that students and their parents are feeling over this critical event:

Last-Minute Guide to 2008 Gaokao Issued

In the final two days, take time to do some practice questions, review your practice tests, and take a walk around the test site

Nutritionist sets out an "exam menu" for test-takers

Arrange transportation, room, and board for those days before-hand

During the exam, attention to detail and mastery of tricks can earn points

Today is World Environment Day (was anyone aware of this?) and to commemorate the occasion, the city of Xuzhou conducted a "health checkup, the results of which were announced yesterday. A gorgeous photo of the city as seen across scenic Yunlong Lake is captioned: "The sky is bluer, the water is clearer, and the city is more beautiful."

We may not have any of that here in Beijing, but we do have our own edition of the Pengcheng Daily: the front-page layout, color scheme, and type design of the newspaper are suspiciously similar to those of The Beijing News.

The logos even resemble each other, too. The logo of The Beijing News is a flame rising from a white Great Wall beacon tower set inside a red circle. Below it is the paper's current motto: "Quality is rooted in responsibility" (品质源于责任). Pengcheng Daily's motto is "Setting the pace for new life" (领跑新生活), and it sits under the initials "PW" inscribed onto a red circle whose bottom half is a splash of white.

The Pengcheng Daily's PDF archives do not go back far enough to determine which paper's the original and which is the plagiarist, but the first issue of The Beijing News, with the logo set above the nameplate, hints at an answer.