Founded on November 7, 1931 as the Red China News Agency in the city of Ruijin in Jiangxi Province, Xinhua (literally means "New China" in Chinese) News Agency changed to its current name in January 1937 in Yan'an, the cradle of China's revolution in northwestern Shaanxi Province.

   Xinhua's headquarters is located in Beijing. Xinhua has 31 regular bureaus on the Chinese mainland, with one in every province, autonomous region and municipality. It also has bureaus in Hong Kong and Macao, as well as correspondents in Taiwan. It has a bureau to report news of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and the Chinese armed forces.

   Aside from reporting in China, Xinhua has a global news gathering network with more than 140 branches overseas and releases news in different languages through a range of media every day. It delivers news and services in the form of text, photos, graphics, audio, videos, short messages, MMS, WAP, electronic magazines and RSS for its subscribers worldwide 24 hours per day in eight languages, namely Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese.

   Over the past years, senior executives of Xinhua have pushed for a "strategic transformation" of the agency, trying to forge a modern multimedia news and information service provider rather than simply producing traditional news products. Facing readers directly is emphasized, compared with the prominence previously given to press subscribers.

   Through this "strategic transformation," Xinhua aims to turn itself into an international competitor by greatly improving its international communication capabilities. Xinhua is adopting an all-media approach in its development to converge its businesses related to wire service, newspapers and periodical publications, TV news, the Internet, financial information services, news media services and multimedia databases.

   The Xinhua-run website www.xinhuanet.com is hailed as one of the most influential in China. The website tracks world news 24 hours a day in eight languages: Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese and Japanese. It ranks 190th among global websites in terms of average page views. It has 31 sub-websites featuring events in each province, autonomous region and municipality on the Chinese mainland. Xinhuanet also manages several of the country's official websites, such as www.gov.cn, www.wenming.cn, www.chinapeace.org.cn and www.chinaeast.gov.cn. Xinhuanet is developing its all-media business and has established an industrial park in Daxing District, Beijing, where it is cooperating with China Mobile, the country's largest telecommunication operator, to develop a search engine www.panguso.com to offer services to China's Internet and mobile phone users.

   China Xinhua News Network Corp. (CNC) is a new global TV station set up by Xinhua in 2010. CNC produces 800 minutes of TV news clips on average each day, ranking first among the world TV news operators in terms of footage length. CNC now has a Chinese-language news channel and an English-language news channel that are broadcast 24 hours a day through satellites that cover 5.5 billion people in more than 200 countries and regions in the Asia Pacific, North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. About 1.7 million households in Hong Kong, Macao and Auckland can also view the two TV news channels through local cable TV systems. CNC is now comprised of 10 affiliated satellite TV stations owned and operated independently or with cooperative partners. CNC news is available on the Internet or for iPhone, iPad and other mobile phone brand users.

   In 2007, Xinhua launched a self-developed financial information service system, Xinhua 08. The Xinhua 08 system was listed as an important project supported by the State Council, or China’s Cabinet. The system provides up-to-date news and information on domestic and overseas currency, capital, foreign exchange, gold, and futures markets as well as other industries. Xinhua 08 provides products through different terminals, such as personal computer terminals, video terminals, website and its magazine, The Financial World. In 2010, Xinhua 08 launched its financial information exchange, an information- sharing platform in the financial and cultural sectors to promote the development of the nation's capital market. Xinhua 08 is helping the exchange build a national financial information center in Beijing, the China Finance Corporation headquarters in Shanghai, and an international petroleum information center in Daqing in northeastern Heilongjiang Province.

   Xinhua runs China Photomall, a photography-oriented website with more than 8,000 photographers who provide China's largest number of authoritative news photos. China Photomall delivers more than 2,000 news photos and graphics every day in real-time. Its affiliated organizations include a photo communication company and the Xinhua Gallery. It has held photo exhibitions in many Chinese and foreign cities featuring the Beijing Olympics 2008 and other major events at home and abroad. It collects photo archives with more than 5 million pictures, of which some were taken in the late 19th century during the Qing Dynasty.

   Xinhua has the largest, multi-language, multimedia database out of all Chinese media. By the end of 2010, the database had 120 million text files, more than 10 million news photos and graphics, 35,000 hours of audio and video clips. Xinhua plans to transform the database into a modern commercial database and open it directly to domestic and foreign users with multi-language and multimedia information data.

   Xinhua is also a publisher, with about 20 newspapers and periodicals such as the Xinhua Daily Telegraph, The Reference News, the Economic Information Daily, the China Securities Journal, the Shanghai Securities News, The Outlook, The Globe, The China Journalist, and The Photo World.