Detail of Taizhou Evening News for 20 February

This clip from the front page of the Taizhou Evening News comes from the blog of Zan Aizong, who noticed that the lead article, discussing the Zhejiang city's import/export economy, contained the line "For imports, the top five countries were Japan, the USA, Korea, the Netherlands, and Taiwan." Obviously, the presence of Taiwan on the list means that "countries" ought to be "countries and regions."

Whose fault is it? Zan traces it back to a report from the Hangzhou Customs Office that was posted on 24 December, 2007 (here's a screenshot of the page before it was edited). The Taizhou Evening News report was basically a verbatim copy of that report.

Zan also remarks:

Taizhou Evening News is a tabloid run by the Taizhou Daily, the official organ of the Taizhou Municipal Party Committee. It has no publication license, so according to current Chinese law it is an "illegal publication." It has published 2,768 issues to date, every one as a normal, illegal publication.

At the bottom of the front page is the line 刊号：浙字第024号, indicating that the paper is registered under the license number "Zhejiang #24" rather than a standard national number issued by GAPP. It's apparently able to do this by virtue of its affiliation with the local party newspaper.

Calling Taiwan a country is just one unfortunate expression of a larger problem facing the Taizhou Evening News and other local newspapers that are caught between the party and the marketplace. Here's how one Taizhou resident described the newspaper in 2006:

Taizhou Evening News has been publishing for quite a while now, and a few reporters and departments displayed some forward progress. But my overall impression is that it is content poor and not as readable as one would like. When my workplace was putting in this year's paper subscriptions, the majority of my colleagues said that the Evening News wasn't interesting, but the Taizhou Commercial Daily was OK. So the work unit subscribed to a copy of the Commercial Daily for practically every office—dozens of subscriptions—but only signed up a couple of Evening News subscriptions, just for appearances.

The Evening News is stingy in its format and even stingier in its content. It lays out news stories like advertisements, and the rare bit of local news is always about fights and theft, most of it turned in by a correspondent at the police department. This makes for good after-dinner conversation, but it's also great propaganda for the public security system. And the majority of the international, domestic, sports, and entertainment stories actually come from Xinhua or some newspaper or other. Sometimes the source isn't even noted, and the byline is a name that may or may not be real—who knows if the author got paid. Regardless, it's all stuff copied off the Internet and no one's going to go after you for it....

They say that the world is a global village. Essentially, this is because the development of the Internet and other modern communications technology means that any single place can be closely connected to the entire world. In Taizhou, we can learn about the world without going out of the house, and we can obtain huge amounts of information quickly and cheaply. In this age, newspapers—particularly local newspapers—need to be smart if they want to survive and win readers.