A state-run media center in Guangxi and a Hong Kong newspaper have jointly launched a short-video series aimed at the Greater Bay Area — Beijing’s ambitious plan to economically and culturally fuse Hong Kong and Macao with nine cities in Guangdong province. It is the latest in a growing pattern of cross-border media collaborations designed to carry the integration message directly to Hong Kong audiences.
The Guangxi International Communication Center (廣西國際傳播中心), or GICC, and the Hong Kong Commercial Daily (香港商報) jointly launched “GBA Insights” (湾區講你知) on February 25. The debut episode sent journalists aboard the high-speed rail connecting Nanning to Hong Kong’s West Kowloon station, where they documented passengers reflecting on how the direct route had simplified their lives. “Getting back to Nanning used to take half a day of hassle,” one frequent traveller told reporters. “Now with the direct high-speed rail, you can have morning tea in Hong Kong and be eating laoyou fen in Nanning by lunch.”
The Hong Kong Commercial Daily — a Chinese state-owned broadsheet published in Hong Kong by the Shenzhen Press Group and controlled by the Hong Kong Liaison Office, Beijing’s primary political arm in the city — was founded in 1952 as the first Chinese-language financial newspaper in Hong Kong and is one of only three Hong Kong newspapers permitted to circulate freely on the mainland.
The series was timed to coincide with an official Guangxi delegation visit to Hong Kong and Macao, a pairing that has become routine as provincial governments increasingly coordinate media outreach with political and economic missions to the city. Future episodes are planned around trade cooperation, cultural exchange, and youth entrepreneurship.
The collaboration between the Hong Kong Commercial Daily and the GICC is one of several recent media arrangements cementing ties between Hong Kong outlets and mainland state broadcasters. In June 2025, RTHK — Hong Kong’s longstanding public broadcaster — signed a memorandum of cooperation with the Guangzhou Broadcasting Network (廣州廣播電視台), or GZBN, including plans for joint productions marking the 80th anniversary of Japan’s wartime surrender and a co-produced radio drama on life in the Greater Bay Area.
RTHK’s director of broadcasting said the broadcaster would leverage its role “linking the interior and connecting the exterior” to foster a stronger sense of national identity among Hong Kong citizens. Months later, in September 2025, Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee met China Media Group (CMG) president Shen Haixiong (慎海雄) at Government House, where Lee expressed gratitude to CMG for “supporting the work of the Hong Kong SAR Government” (支持香港特區政府的工作). Lee pledged to “deepen co-operation with CMG” in order, he said, echoing Xi Jinping’s political language on global communication, to “jointly tell the world good stories of China and Hong Kong.”
The content these partnerships produce tends to foreground the practical rewards of integration: faster journeys, closer families, shared economic opportunity. The political case for convergence, in this framing, speaks for itself — or so China’s media strategists hope.
Guangxi, which lies outside the formal nine-city GBA cluster, has been particularly keen to attach itself to the Bay Area brand, using the Nanning–West Kowloon rail link as a centrepiece of that effort. The province’s state broadcaster, Guangxi Radio and Television (廣西廣播電視台),signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with RTHK in September 2025 on program resources and talent exchange — a deal struck at the China-ASEAN Expo in Nanning and witnessed by the National Radio and Television Administration (國家廣播電視總局), an agency under the Central Propaganda Department. State media said the partnership aimed to “tell China’s story well” to ASEAN nations, pointing to the broader role of south China in state-led communication efforts toward Southeast Asia.
