Looking back over three decades during which I had close involvement in the production of The China Quarterly, I am struck by both the degrees of continuity and by the forces for change. On the continuity side, the role of the host institution, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) has been vitally important to its survival and development to become the pre-eminent journal in the field. At the same time, continuity would have been neither evident nor achievable without the stimuli provided by the current history of China and by those working in China studies. On the side of change, the major driving force has been the overall effect of advances in technology. Successively since the 1990s, these have transformed the means by which authors' contributions are composed and submitted, the stages in conducting the editorial process, and the ways in which the journal is printed, published, marketed and delivered.
By the time I was appointed to succeed Dick Wilson as Editor of The China Quarterly in 1980, I had been responsible over several years for the composition of the Internal Affairs section of the Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation. Although I always intended to draft it in instalments to avoid the pressure arising from the deadline, for one reason or another I soon discovered that to be an aspiration rather than a reality. Consequently, having gathered the material, in practice, the time normally devoted to the Chronicle amounted to about one frantic week at the end of each quarter. During these years I was appointed to the editorial board and its Executive Committee, and had the opportunity to gain greater insight into both the institutional setting and the production process of the journal.
When I became editor, The China Quarterly was an organ of the Contemporary China Institute (CCI) in SOAS. With foundation support, this had been established in 1968 to promote the study of contemporary China as a separate field from that of Sinology, a primary focus of the Department of the Far East, whose publications would more often be published in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. The CCI had a distinguished board and a proactive promotional role, not only in SOAS but beyond. The editor of The China Quarterly was, in the first instance, answerable to the current head of the CCI. In my case, I responded to James Watson, and later to Hugh Baker. Under my successors, the relationship between The China Quarterly and the CCI became less direct as the role of the CCI, determined by available funding, declined.
The political economic context in which The China Quarterly was published in the 1980s was formed by improved Sino-US relations and the rise of Dengism, the promoting of the “four modernizations” (industry, agriculture, national defence, and science and technology), the creation of the four Special Economic Zones (SEZs: Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen) and by the adoption and implementation of the general policy of “reform and opening out” (gaige kaifang). Meanwhile, in the then second superpower, the Soviet Union (USSR), where from 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev was General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the implementation of the radical programme of reform and restructuring (perestroika) and openness of information (glasnost) was to lead ultimately to the dissolution of the USSR itself. Correspondingly, it also led to irreversible change in the Eastern European communist states. In retrospect, it was to be expected that such a cataclysmic change affecting the practice of Marxism-Leninism would carry serious implications for and have severe repercussions in China. The gravest immediate outcome of the perceived threat to the Chinese state system was to be the violent suppression of the student protest movement, by the army, in Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Throughout this decade, The China Quarterly continued to receive a steady stream of high quality research-based manuscripts on the history and development of contemporary China. An important addition to this approach to the content of the journal was achieved by developing the practice of publishing “single subject” issues or part issues of the journal. This led to our initiating special issues on topics such as Hong Kong, entitled “Hong Kong Briefing” (No. 95, 1983), which I edited to coincide with the Sino-British negotiations; on the Chinese economy, entitled “The Readjustment in the Chinese Economy” (No. 100, 1984) for which Christopher Howe and Kenneth R Walker were guest editors; on food and agriculture entitled “Food and Agriculture in the Post-Mao Era” (No. 116, 1988) for which Kenneth R Walker and Y. Y Kueh were guest editors; on the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the state, entitled “The People's Republic of China After 40 Years” (No. 119, 1989) which I edited; and on the Sino-Japanese relationship entitled “China and Japan: History, Trends and Prospects” (No. 124, 1990) for which Christopher Howe was guest editor. Part issues of the journal were published to mark the centenary of the birth of Lu Xun in 1881 (No. 91, 1984), and as ‘Taiwan Briefing’ (No. 99, 1984). Separately, in 1983, the CCI published The China Quarterly Index in two volumes, Nos. 1–40 (1960–69) and Nos. 41–80 (1970–79), compiled by Michael Dillon.
Together with the feedback on The China Quarterly during regular visits to the US, the experience gained from commissioning and publishing the special issues was very valuable. Regarding the US contacts, I am very grateful for the meetings mostly arranged by editorial board members at universities including California (Berkeley), Columbia, Harvard, Michigan (Ann Arbor), Stanford and Virginia, for the opportunities to visit the State Department and the Rand Corporation. On these occasions, Tom Bernstein, Cyril Birch, Merle Goldman, Chalmers Johnson, Bill Skinner, Rod MacFarquhar, Mike Oksenberg, Leng Shao-chuan, Lucian Pye and many other friends and colleagues were a ready source of support. In Japan, the same could be said of Shigeru Ishikawa, in France of Marianne Bastid, in Germany of Brunhild Staiger and in Hong Kong of John Burns, Anthony Dicks, Edward Chen, Ambrose King, Y. Y. Kueh and Wang Gungwu. Here, I must also mention David Wilson who, not so long after his tenure as Editor, following the resumption of his career at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was appointed Governor of Hong Kong. He had a punishing work schedule but never failed to offer a generous and stimulating welcome to The China Quarterly at Government House. These contacts widened the scope of and enriched the discussion at the quarterly meetings of the Executive Committee. On these occasions, the agenda items conventionally included a review of the latest issue, the content of the next two issues, a review of the content and status of the manuscripts in the pipeline, subscription statistics, relations with the School, the printers and so forth. In this context, it led to our being more proactive in identifying and endeavouring to meet the needs of the several constituencies of readers of The China Quarterly including academics, students and practitioners such as those in government, business, the teaching profession and the media.
We also became more aware of the market, of the need for separate funding in support of special issues if they were not to deplete our resources and of the increased possibility of publishing high-quality papers presented at conferences, subject to the normal refereeing process. For special issues, besides the print run in excess of three thousand copies with the standard cover design and colour sequence, we additionally printed one thousand copies with a carefully selected subject-relevant pictorial (photographic) cover for retail sale. The photographs selected were supplied by contributors. The notable exception was issue No. 119 in September 1989 when we increased the print-run but, in the dark circumstances, abandoned the practice of a special cover. In retrospect, given the passage of events, these issues, with their evocative covers, may well become collectors' items.
It came as no surprise that the publishing of special issues at regular intervals should lead to a book series in which the additional print run of the issue marketed with a distinctive cover, would actually appear as a paperback. This practice was adopted in the early 1990s when, together with the CCI, which sponsored the Studies on Contemporary China series, and Oxford University Press (OUP) we published several special issues of The China Quarterly as books. The special issue on Greater China, which had been conceived towards the end of my period as editor, and edited by my successor, David Shambaugh, firstly as issue No. 136 (1993) and secondly as Greater China: The Next Superpower, published by OUP in 1995, was an early example of this successful collaboration.
The early 1990s also marked the beginning of an important period of change for the journal. Not only did China, led by Deng Xiaoping, change by taking the early steps towards a recovery from the political crisis of the late 1980s and by signalling the start of what was to become the economic ascendancy, but the practical aspects of academic journal production were about to be revolutionized by new technology. The advent of computers and electronic communication was evident in the late 1980s but it took some time before the change it brought was fully implemented in the publishing industry. Suffice to say that while the production and distribution processes of The China Quarterly today retain many important features of the past, they also include innovations that have transformed the access to and the reach of the knowledge conveyed by academic journals.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, production and distribution of the journal depended on the members of the editorial board willingly to referee manuscripts, on the Executive Committee for strategic decisions; on the then assistant editor, Gail Eadie Duggett and her temporary successors, Caroline Mason and Murray Mindlin, to progress the proofs, to conduct relations with the printer and to prepare for committee meetings; on Alison Surry for proof reading; on Grace Pursey for managing the subscriptions with the aid of a large card index system loaded onto correspondingly large carousel; on the indomitable Sandra de Souza, our secretary, shared as it happened with Bob Ash, Head of the CCI, on whom we also depended for the Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation.
The main marketing change to take place with implementation of new technology led to the publishing and distribution stages of the production process of the journal being outsourced to, or taken over by, depending on one's point of view, a professional publisher. For The China Quarterly, in the first instance this was OUP with which there was an ongoing relationship. Since 2000, this link has been with Cambridge University Press (CUP) which also publishes The China Quarterly Special Issues New Series. Accordingly, while The China Quarterly remains the property of SOAS and the essential editorial roles and priorities of the Editor, Executive Committee, the Editorial Board and the management team remain, mutatis mutandis, largely unchanged, the transmission, printing, distribution, marketing and sales stages have been transformed.
A key aspect of this transformation distinguishing the 1980s and early 1990s from the 2000s is online access to the journal, achieved by subscribers through the PDF files or the HTML display. These files are prepared by the typesetters in India from copy-edited content. The PDF files are used at the proofreading stage and ultimately, processed by the printers, currently in Glasgow. The printing process, based on a five-day turnaround, is now much faster than in the 1980s and early 1990s. CUP is seeking to retain and develop individual subscriptions while investing heavily in sales potential to consortia that now represent the growing online usage of the journal. Whereas in the 1980s and early 1990s, subscriptions would be recorded on individual cards, the subscriber now is more likely to be an institution as part of a consortium which buys the products as part of a package or bundle. Taking the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) as an example, the consortium, known as JULAC (Joint Universities Librarians Advisory Committee) formed by local university libraries, deals directly with the sales departments of publishers. Access to the online version is controlled and the publisher is able to track usage to feed back relevant data to the in-house and SOAS editorial teams. The outcome is that access, production, marketing, sales, advertising and promotional activities are improved and their relocation enables the SOAS editorial team to concentrate on core tasks.
Against a background of continuity and change, what are the main challenges likely to be faced by The China Quarterly? One is to sustain the status of the journal in the context of increasing competition. Long-run Thomson Reuter impact ratings (The Social Science Citation Index), a widely recognized measure of impact and competitiveness, place The China Quarterly highly among the top ten of the area studies category. Last year, it ranked number two of all area-studies journals over a five-year period. Rankings can, however, change rapidly and we must not rest on our laurels. Coming at a time when the study of the political, economic and social implications of the ascendancy of China have seldom, if ever, been the subject of greater attention in world affairs, this metric merits careful interrogation and monitoring.
A second and related challenge concerns the content of the journal. While standards attained in editing, production, marketing and delivery are consistently very high, it remains as vital today as it has been throughout the past 50 years to seek to ensure that content and foci reflect the major issues raised by the extraordinary development of China, including its significance for the constituent disciplines of business and management studies. Arising from this quest, a further aim could be to try to ensure that the content of each issue, besides comprising articles that are important for their respective sub-fields, should also include at least one that would be regarded as too important to miss by the entire field. Meeting this challenge could become a strategic priority for the incoming executive committee.
Lastly, it is clear that Chinese China studies scholars based at home or abroad now generate or contribute to the generation of a growing proportion of the results of the current research. This trend will have to be taken into consideration and appropriately acknowledged whenever the membership of the editorial board is reviewed. Further, as a recognition of mainland interest in the content of The China Quarterly, it may be worthwhile considering the case for publishing the book version of special issues in both English and Chinese editions. Some of these matters may be more challenging and less readily tackled than others, but seen from here, sooner or later, they will have to be met.
