Nationalist news site in China
Guancha.cn () is a Chinese news site based in Shanghai, founded by Eric X. Li, a Stanford-educated venture capitalist and a political scientist at the Fudan University. Guancha.cn has been categorized in an Amsterdam University Press study as a privately owned internet platform outside of state-controlled media and is noted for its pro-government and West-skeptical views, having been described as a nationalist website, with Agence France-Presse and "The Conversation" calling it ultranationalist.
About.
Guancha.cn mainly publishes online news content in Chinese. Its homepage format consists of a headline news, followed by a "left column" consisting of op-eds, a "central column" consisting of news, and a "right column", consisting of user generated content. Its content is mainly focused on international news and affairs, with an additional focus on economic issues. The website's reader demographics is "predominantly young people".
Guancha also publishes content in other formats, such as video. Guancha's official account has 7.46 million fans on the video sharing website Bilibili, frequented mainly by young people, as of September 2023. It also has a number of other affiliated video accounts, some associated with individual content producers.
The website's motto is stated as "Chinese heart, global perspective; understand the world from here; independent and responsible".
The website describes itself as a "online news and comments aggregator".
History.
Guancha.cn was founded in 2012. Before its founding, an online platform known as "Social observer" had been founded by Shanghai Chunqiu Development Strategy Research Institute in 2010; this was described by Doublethink Labs as "Guancha's genesis".
A key event during Guancha's formative period was its coverage of Zhang Weiwei's 2011 debate with Francis Fukuyama, where Zhang Weiwei promoted the "Chinese model" and questioned Western democracy. Zhang Weiwei is also a co-founder of Guancha.
Guancha was originally launched as Social Observer's online arm, but the two became officially disaffiliated in 2014.
In 2013, a number of techno-nationalists calling themselves the "Industrial Party" joined the site and have influenced it.
In 2020, the website has spoken out against Donald Trump's suspension from Twitter. Donald Trump was described as a "key driver of clicks for Guancha".
In 2021, the website criticized Intel's ban of using components from Xinjiang.