China newspaper to open office in Nigeria

The Chinese national daily, China Daily, said it will open an office in Nigeria before the end of this year in order to further strengthen the bilateral relations between the two countries.

This is intended for Nigerians to understand developments in China as well as to serve Chinese companies in the country.

This was disclosed yesterday by the Board Director, Deputy Chief Editor of the newspaper Mr. Gao Anming during a meeting with a group of journalists from Africa in Beijing, China.

The office will be set up in collaboration with a local company and will start printing in Nigeria.

“We will send a reporter by the end of this year to Nigeria to study and understand how newspaper work is done in Nigeria but we are going to employ some journalists within the country to work for the newspaper,” he said.

Apart from the China Daily, the newspaper is also printing a weekly paper titled Africa Weekly which was launched in 2010 with news across African countries especially on Chinese investments across the continent and printed in Nairobi.

Also speaking, the Assistant to Editorin-Chief and Editor, International Edition, Mr. Ji Tao, announced the newspaper’s plan to start printing Africa Weekly in French to serve the francophone countries in the continent which is expected to start from Congo and Senegal.

Fielding questions on how the company survived the pressure from the government being a national newspaper, Anming said they do not experience any pressure from government as the company is independent and does not rely on government for its revenue.

“We generate our revenue from advertisement, circulation and Corporate organisations that use our news contents. Government do not subsidize for us and we do not have government officials sitting down in our office to dictate for us. We criticize government policy and government does not influence our editorial,” he said.

On the content of the newspaper, he said “it is a general newspaper that covers every aspect of the society and we have 50 percent each for both news contents and advertisement.