Insight · Seasonality
The Xinwen Lianbo calendar: China's official year, month by month
A decade of nightly broadcasts has a heartbeat. Aggregate every mention of a recurring topic by calendar month and the official year emerges: the Spring Festival travel rush owns January–February, the Two Sessions own March (64% of all mentions land there), Gaokao owns June, flood control owns July, harvest owns September, and cold waves close out the year. Each chart below folds ten years of broadcasts into twelve months.
Spring Festival travel rush 春运
354 items · peaks in Feb
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6
7
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9
10
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The Two Sessions 两会
644 items · peaks in Mar
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9
10
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Tree planting 植树
195 items · peaks in Apr
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9
10
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Gaokao college entrance exam 高考
114 items · peaks in Jun
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Flood control 防汛
559 items · peaks in Jul
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Harvest 丰收
703 items · peaks in Sep
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Winter heating 供暖
127 items · peaks in Dec
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Cold waves 寒潮
177 items · peaks in Dec
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Methodology
- · Counts:
GET /v1/news?q=<term>&group_by=month, then folded by calendar month across all years (2016–present). - · Exact-phrase matching; counts are items, not phrase frequency.
- · The current year is partial, which slightly under-weights months still ahead. Data as of 2026-06-11.
Fold any topic into the calendar via the Xinwen Lianbo full-text API. More findings: Data Insights.