China’s once-dominant internet forum Tianya has announced concrete steps toward a return: a new joint working group and affiliated companies say the site will resume access on June 1, 2026, and are selling a limited run of “founder” service packages to bankroll the revival. The package is capped at 9,999 units, priced at 1,999 yuan each, and organisers say all proceeds will go toward preserving Tianya’s data and restoring site access. The move is being positioned as a community-backed rescue of a digital archive that its organisers say embodies decades of user-generated memory.
Tianya’s decline has been gradual and public. The forum, which helped incubate prominent Chinese online writers and thousands of viral posts, stopped regular operations in 2019 after disputes in Chengdu that the operators say damaged cash flow. In 2023 the site suspended access after falling behind on telecom IDC fees and reporting acute financial and legal difficulties, including loan refusals, litigation and staff departures. Previous grassroots crowdfunding and livestream efforts to revive the platform fell far short of their targets.
The proposed relaunch is being led by Chengdu Tianyake Network Technology Co., the stated principal investor in the “New Tianya” effort, together with a voluntary team of former staff and supporters. The package being marketed to backers includes a digital badge, a premium membership box, ten years’ free access to a paid “top post” zone and access to a new “meta-space” for the community. The organisers frame the sale as both a fundraising instrument and a way to recruit “founding members” who will help rebuild the platform.
This iteration of Tianya is being pitched as a commercial pivot as well as a preservation effort. Founder Xing Ming has previously described attempts to reposition Tianya with e‑commerce ties—particularly focused on Hainan, where China is developing a major free‑trade port—and the company has explored selling assets such as the premium domain hainan.com to raise cash. Those steps underline the tension between salvaging a community archive and finding a sustainable business model in a more regulated, commercialised Chinese internet.
The relaunch has wider significance beyond a single website. Tianya’s archives are a living record of two decades of online public discourse, amateur literature and social networks; their loss would be a notable contraction of a Chinese digital commons. The fundraising‑for‑access model also illustrates how ageing platforms without stable corporate backing are increasingly forced to monetise their users’ cultural capital to survive. That dynamic raises questions about who controls and benefits from historic online content.
The path ahead is uncertain. The success of the founder packs will test whether former users and nostalgic backers are willing to pay to preserve what they consider a shared cultural asset. Regulators, data‑hosting partners and the platform’s ability to resolve prior financial and legal entanglements remain critical variables. Observers should watch whether the relaunch restores public access to archived material intact, whether commercial features reshape the community, and whether Tianya’s governance model can reassure users that the platform’s memories will be preserved rather than monetised away.