Jing Yidan

Jing Yidan was born on 27 April 1955 in Harbin, Heilongjiang, in northeast China. Public memorials describe her parents as cadres in Heilongjiang's political-legal system. Like many of her generation, she was sent to the countryside during the Down to the Countryside Movement and worked as a sent-down youth before returning to Heilongjiang after the Cultural Revolution.

She studied at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute, later renamed the Communication University of China, and graduated around 1979. The training shaped a career that mixed reporting, editing and on-camera presenting. China Media Group memorials note that she joined the Communist Party of China in July 1974. After graduation she was assigned to Long Guang, Heilongjiang People's Radio, as a news anchor, learning the craft of live radio before moving to national television.

Jing joined China Central Television in 1988. Over the next decades she hosted a succession of flagship programmes: Economic 30 Minutes, Yidan Topics, Oriental Horizon, News Probe, Live China, Focus Interview and Touching China. Colleagues and viewers associated her with a calm, measured style at a time when other star anchors were known for sharper edges.

Focus Interview, which she joined in 1993, made her a household name. The programme specialised in investigative and public-interest stories under the motto "Let facts speak". She stayed with it for more than twenty years. From 2002 she hosted Touching China for about nineteen consecutive years, introducing annual honour stories that became a national ritual.

She was also a front-line live broadcaster. In 1997 she helped anchor the Hong Kong handover coverage; in 1999 she did the same for Macao. In 2008 she was an Olympic torchbearer in Harbin. Industry awards followed early: Golden Mike Awards in 1993, 1995 and 1997. She later held roles including vice-president of the China Association of Radio and Television, and taught or advised journalism students, including as a visiting professor at Shanxi University in 2018 and as a judge for the 2019 national hosting competition.

She recorded her last Focus Interview episode on 30 April 2015, wished viewers a happy Labour Day, bowed to the camera, and retired from frontline CCTV hosting.

In October 1985 Jing married Wang Zimu, whom she had met when both sat university entrance examinations in Beijing: she for the broadcasting institute, he for Tsinghua University's economics programme. She later described him as combining tolerance and confidence. Wang worked in government economic posts before founding Huatai Insurance and serving as its chairman until retirement around 2022.

They have one daughter, Wang Erqing, who studied abroad, married a Scotsman named Nick in 2011, and later worked on rural public-interest projects while based in Beijing. After Jing's death it was Wang Erqing who posted the family obituary on her mother's WeChat account.

In retirement Jing wrote memoirs and essays, kept a WeChat public account, and adopted a stray cat named Xiaoman after the Grain Buds solar term. She told readers she had long felt stuck at forty: pretending to be middle-aged when young so she could mature faster, and pretending again when older so she could age more slowly.

Jing defined herself as a reporter-type host whose first skill was learning to enter a scene rather than perform above it. In lectures at her alma mater she argued that the most important foundation for such hosting was immersion in the field. In I Met You she summarised her craft as drawing programmes closer to the audience, then closer again, in both openings and closing comments.

She believed written words outlasted spoken ones and said she wrote because she feared forgetting. After heavy earlier books about youth and career pain, she turned to lighter seasonal essays. At the Beijing Book Fair in January 2026 she told a reader worried about television's decline that good content could travel in any form. She favoured moderation and contentment, linking them to the solar term xiaoman, "a little fullness", and rejecting the idea of complete fullness.

Public memorials after her death emphasised warmth, steadiness and proximity to ordinary people rather than confrontation for its own sake.

In June 2026 Jing suffered an acute cerebral hemorrhage in Harbin. She was treated there and then transferred to Beijing, where she remained in hospital for nearly three months. In July her account asked the public not to spread rumours about her condition.

She died at about 5:00 a.m. on 13 September 2026 in Beijing, aged 71. That morning her daughter Wang Erqing published an obituary on the "Jing Yidan" WeChat public account, calling her "my dearest mother" and "Big Sister Jing so familiar to everyone". The notice included Jing's handwritten line "感谢这世界，让我走过". China Media Group and CCTV colleagues confirmed the death and published tributes recalling her programmes, her live handover broadcasts, and her decades as a trusted national face of television news.

Jing's legacy sits at the centre of Chinese television's late-twentieth-century news culture. For millions of viewers she was the voice of Focus Interview and Touching China: serious without theatrics, familiar without losing formality. Younger journalists and hosting contestants met her as a teacher and judge; readers met her after retirement as an essayist of seasons and memory.

She left books that record both the hard years of sent-down youth and the gentler observations of later life, and she left a catchphrase of gratitude that her family chose to publish at the end: thank you, world, for letting me walk through it. Colleagues remembered her as Jing Dajie, the person you could link arms with outside the old CCTV building and talk to as if ordinary life had never left the studio.

• I Met You (我遇到你) - reflections on people and stories from her television career; its afterword ends with the line about embracing tomorrow.
• Letters of Those Years (那年那信) - a collection built around family and period letters.
• I, a Last Sent-Down Student (我 末代工农兵学员) - memoir of her experience as one of the last cohort of worker-peasant-soldier students / sent-down youth.
• Between Steps (步履之间, 2025) - essays structured around China's 24 solar terms; discussed with readers at the Beijing Book Fair in January 2026.

She also produced short digital programmes after retirement, including Yidan on the Solar Terms and Museum in Nine Minutes.

• Golden Mike Award (金话筒奖), television hosting, 1993
• Golden Mike Award, 1995
• Golden Mike Award, 1997
• National May 1st Labour Medal
• National urban women's "March 8 Red-Banner Pace-Setter" / related honour titles reported in official memorials
• Vice-president, China Association of Radio and Television
• Member, 9th and 10th National Committees of the CPPCC
• Deputy to the 11th National People's Congress (Guangxi delegation, per Chinese biographical sources)
• 50-year Party membership commemorative medal, presented at a China Media Group event
• Olympic torchbearer, Harbin leg, 2008
• Visiting professor, School of Journalism, Shanxi University (2018)
• Professional judge, China Media Group national hosting competition (2019)