1. To Study Gansu, First Admit Its "Smallness"

Studying a province's printing and recording media reproduction industry usually starts with finding the leaders, the clusters and the numbers. Applied to Gansu, this approach quickly meets an honest premise: this is an industry the trade has long described as "small, scattered and weak." It has no sprawling printing industrial parks like the coastal provinces, no density of hundreds of above-scale printing enterprises, and one can hardly assemble a complete map of its output value from public channels.

For exactly this reason, Gansu offers a clean sample to study. When an industry is neither large nor dense, its structure becomes unusually clear — you can see plainly who is truly holding the map up. In Gansu, that answer can almost be condensed into a single thread: one cultural-media group that began in publishing and extended into printing. To study Gansu's printing and recording media reproduction industry is, to a large degree, to study how this thread took shape and where it is now trying to go.

A caveat first: printing is a fragmented industry stitched together from a great many small and medium print shops, commercial printing and packaging printing; many firms are not listed and disclose no operating data. This report addresses only what public information can confirm; where a segment cannot be found or is uncertain, it would rather write short and leave a blank than fabricate firms, shares and figures.

2. The Reader Publishing Group: a Thread Running Through the Industry

To understand Gansu's printing map, one cannot bypass the Reader Publishing Group.

This provincially owned comprehensive cultural enterprise integrates publishing, printing and distribution, and is best known to the public for the flagship of Reader magazine. But in the context of the printing and recording media reproduction industry, its real weight lies in another identity: its core subsidiary, Reader Publishing & Media Co., Ltd., was listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in December 2015, becoming the first publishing-media company in northwestern China to list on a domestic main board.

This identity matters because it binds the most stable block of demand in Gansu's printing industry — the printing of books, magazines and textbooks — to an entity subject to capital-market discipline and obliged to disclose continuously. The printing of textbooks and teaching aids, key books and periodicals is itself a business underwritten by plan and channel, with very high certainty. A group that holds the full chain of publishing, printing and distribution keeps this demand inside its own system, and thereby holds the least-losable base of Gansu's printing industry.

In other words, the "scatter" of Gansu's printing industry is a surface appearance; beneath it lies a relatively clear backbone. This backbone is not the density piled up by free competition in the market, but the vertical chain a single group forms by extending from its core publishing business into printing. Only with this layer understood do all the later discussions of transformation and boundaries find their footing.

3. The Green Printing Base: a Head-On Response to "Small, Scattered and Weak"

If book and textbook printing is the ground tone of this thread, then the green printing industrial base in Lanzhou New Area is its head-on attempt to rewrite the "small, scattered and weak" pattern.

On 27 May 2024, the Reader High-Tech Green Printing Industrial Base project broke ground in the Zhongchuan Park of Lanzhou New Area. Public information indicates total investment of about 273 million yuan, occupying roughly 100 mu, with Gansu Reader Printing Co., Ltd., an entity within the group's system, as the construction-and-operation body. It plans an annual book-and-magazine printing scale of about 1.3 million reams and is positioned as a standardized, digitalized, intelligent and green modern printing industrial base. The word "green" is not rhetoric — it corresponds to lower-pollution process routes such as computer-to-plate and water-circulation systems, with the aim of producing low-pollution, high-quality printed products.

The significance of this project becomes clear only against Gansu printing's "small, scattered and weak" foundation. For a long time, what Gansu has lacked is not printing demand but a vehicle to concentrate scattered small and medium capacity and uniformly upgrade quality with modern processes. Concentrating certainty-rich demand such as books and textbooks into one modern base, then gradually extending to finer packaging products — boxes, gift boxes, even medicine boxes and cigarette packs — is essentially an effort to use one intensive fulcrum to lever the overall level of a fragmented industry. Whether it can truly change the pattern depends on whether, after the capacity ramps up, the base can steadily take on market-driven packaging orders beyond books and magazines — on which public information cannot yet conclude, and this report makes no conjecture.

4. Newspapers, Textbooks and Packaging: Several Branches Where Market and System Interweave

Beyond the main thread, Gansu's printing and recording media reproduction industry has several branches worth noting; together they form the true texture of an industry where the market-driven and the institutional interweave.

Newspaper printing is among the more institutional of these. The printing branch of the Gansu Daily Press Group won a "premium-grade newspaper" award in the 2023 national printing-quality appraisal. Demand for newspaper printing is underwritten by the media system, while technically it must continually refine the balance between timeliness and quality; behind a single award lies the effort of such print shops to make their craft solid within a narrow but stable lane.

Textbook printing is a branch that distributes institutional demand to market entities. Gansu's primary- and secondary-school textbooks are printed to green-printing standards, undertaken by a set of qualified local green-printing enterprises. This means the largest and most certain block of printing demand — textbooks — is not monopolized by one or two factories, but scattered across multiple enterprises with green-printing capability. This is precisely a positive footnote to the "scatter" of Gansu's printing industry: dispersed, but with a unified quality threshold.

Packaging and cigarette-pack printing is the segment closest to the market and least disclosed. Gansu's local tobacco industry, together with pharmaceutical and consumer-goods firms, continually procures cigarette-packaging materials, drug packaging and various commercial printed products from print shops. These orders are scattered among a great many small and medium print and packaging firms, and a complete directory can hardly be assembled from public channels. What can be confirmed is that the demand is real and tightly meshed with local pillar industries such as tobacco and pharmaceuticals; as for the precise structure of firms and their shares, public information is limited, and this report fills no blanks.

5. Upstream and Downstream: Paper from Outside, Orders from Within

Pulling the view to the industrial chain, a structural feature of Gansu's printing industry surfaces: its upstream depends heavily on other provinces, while its downstream demand is embedded deep at home.

Upstream paper, ink, plate material and printing equipment are in limited local supply in Gansu, and most must be procured from other provinces or even the coast. This means the cost of Gansu's print shops is, to a considerable degree, tied to external raw-material markets; what they can control locally is mainly craft, efficiency and service. Downstream is the opposite — textbooks and teaching aids, newspapers and periodicals, commercial printing for government and enterprises, and packaging printing for tobacco and pharmaceuticals — almost all this demand grows in Gansu itself, held up by the province's publishing, education, media and manufacturing.

This structure of "upstream outside, orders within" is both a constraint and an opportunity. The constraint is that fluctuations in paper prices and equipment costs transmit down the chain, leaving local print shops little bargaining room; the opportunity is that as long as local demand from publishing, education, tobacco and pharmaceuticals persists, Gansu's printing capacity has a home market no one can take away. What the green printing base is trying to do is precisely to catch this home demand more efficiently and intensively.

For those upstream manufacturers supplying Gansu's printing enterprises — whether makers of paper, ink and plate material, or of printing and post-press equipment — finding these print-shop customers scattered across Gansu in bulk is no easy task. Sales teams supplying upstream to the printing and recording media reproduction industry can use Tianxia Gongchang to filter, along the two dimensions of region and industry, the directory of factories in Gansu's printing and recording media reproduction industry along with decision-maker contacts — turning upstream sales prospecting from door-to-door inquiry into following the map.

6. The Institute's Assessment: a Clear Spine, Muscle Yet to Grow

Pulling the threads together, Gansu's printing and recording media reproduction industry presents a picture of "a clear spine, muscle yet to grow." The spine is the vertical chain the Reader Publishing Group has built around books and textbooks — certain, stable, the industry's most reliable fulcrum; the muscle is the small and medium print shops scattered across newspapers, commercial printing, packaging and cigarette packs — close to the market, yet still thin.

The real question for this industry is not how many more print shops to add, but whether the scattered capacity can be drawn toward higher craft and more intensive organization. The green printing industrial base is an attempt in this direction worth recording, but the question it must answer still lies ahead: when market-driven packaging demand beyond book orders is put on the table, can an intensive base take it on more steadily and do it better than the scattered small shops.

The Tianxia Gongchang Industry Research Institute's assessment is this: the point of interest in Gansu's printing industry has never been scale, but how one spine can move a whole body of muscle. A publishing group holding the most certain demand in its hands has given this small province's printing industry a rare fulcrum; and beyond that fulcrum, whether the scattered small and medium print shops can grow genuine competitiveness amid the tide of greening and intensification is what most merits watching across Gansu's printing map in the coming years. Whether an industry called "small, scattered and weak" for years can at least strike the word "weak" first — the answer lies not in an output-value table, but in whether each print shop is willing to push its craft one step further.

Data Sources

  • Tianxia Gongchang (directory of factories and industry data for Gansu's printing and recording media reproduction industry and its upstream)
  • Lanzhou New Area portal: the Reader High-Tech Green Printing Industrial Base project breaks ground in the New Area (total investment, area, groundbreaking date, project positioning)
  • Gansu Daily: "Building a New Benchmark for the Printing Industry in Northwest China — Notes on the Construction of the Reader Green Printing Industrial Base in Lanzhou New Area" (green processes and product direction)
  • Official site of the Reader Publishing Group and public materials of Reader Publishing & Media Co., Ltd. (group composition, listing background, book and textbook printing business)
  • China Gansu Net: "Gansu's Autumn 2025 Textbook Printing and Distribution Enters Full Sprint" (green-printing enterprises participating in textbook printing)
  • Gansu Daily: the printing branch of the Gansu Daily Press Group wins a 2023 national "premium-grade newspaper" printing award
  • Gansu Economic Information Network: procurement notices for printed products and packaging materials by Gansu's tobacco industry and the Lanzhou tobacco company (packaging and cigarette-pack printing demand)