What if someone was to make a magazine that would be given away for free, does one still require a kan hao?

Im thinking of creating a monthly magazine, for a paticular interest (not a city guide) and there seems to be little/no competition in this area. (as of yet)

As far as I know, yes.

The other way that I know of people can circumvent the magazine publishing numbe is to publish book series (以书代刊) instead. This has been seen especially among the semi-academic social science journals published by research institutes and ngos. Presumably, it is easier to purchase the book publishing licence number (书号) than the magazine number. As long as you'd like to pay the publisher for 20,000 yuan and the journals are not ostensibly anti the dear party, you may be able to obtain a book publishing licence and you could publish a quarterly journal or a four-serie book using one licence number. A known example is sannong zhongguo (三农中国).

Pine: you are quite right. That's going to be the next in the series - it doesn't strictly fall under the 刊号 issue, so I decided to treat it separately. It also presents a different problem for distribution.

I find it ironic. AV World Magazine is a music magazine that no one buy. They took material from foreign magazines such as Rolling Stone without paying for copyright. Since Rolling Stone cannot use the original name under AV World's kan hao, now they are published under AV World with some Rolling Stone material inside and claimed Rolling Stone lives on under AV World. Don't kid yourself! Now I assume AV World gets kan hao fee, keep their loser name, and can run Rolling Stone material legitimately! I also assume Rolling Stone in the US also gets license fee for give their material (since their name is of no use in China now) to a magazine that used to rip them off. So Who's actually paying for the kan hao screw up from Redgate Media and Media2U? The shareholders of One Media Group?

to Stanley:
my best (and almost certain) guess is YES, and above all their HK partner Ming Pao (probably screwed up in turn by Peter Brack, former Time Inc. Asia executive who initiated the whole Redgate Media2U thing, and who had been "hired" by Ming Pao to play the go between with Western publishers -it started with a few UK or US publishers for T3, Top Gear, Popular Science, already playing with fire with several titles in Beijing under the same ISSN nbr, titles which couldn't be seen anywhere anyway ...before signing up with Rolling Stone for Pop China; so the GAPP had them in their line of fire already).
Finally, when you think about it, if everythings works well, it is the advertisers who are screwed up...
The whole idea apparently here concerning the Ming Pao-Brack team and their look-alikes, because it was a trend 2-3 years ago in HK (I have several other very similar examples: Newsweek with an obscur IT company,etc. -SCMP with Maxim is also in the same league-), was to get listed in HK, even for obscur companies, or improve your stock, on the basis of some licensee contracts with well known foreign magazine brands for the PRC (even with almost no print media business or experience within the PRC). At the time, thanks to booming ad markets in Pop China (even during the world ad recession 2-3 years ago), an IPO with the magic words "media" and "(Pop) China" was sure to bring you HKD 50 million or more... I hope analysts have learned or will learn... not sure (note that the big brands, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, etc. didn't care at first because the license fee is usually quite high, let's say RMB 1 million or more every year... but big guys in London or NY may start realizing that in dealing with HK compradores messing up as usual in turn with the GAPP they are damaging their image) [I stop here, could write for hours about that...]

To Pine and Joel:
there are foreign publishers who tried to publish magazines with ISBN numbers (for books, instead of ISSNs for magazines), a few years ago in Pop China; they were the "partworks" (i.e. encyclopedias broken into monthly pieces, with gifts, an extraordinary market in Southern Europe today, expanding quickly up North); but they stopped; it was a bit of a costly nightmare to find ISBN numbers every month...
(and it is hard to make money in this business if you can't rely on a very efficient and global distribution system, which doesn't exist in Pop China) [I stop here, could write hours about that...]