Editorial initiatives

With respect to the organization of the journal, I felt that the journal's articles had become too esoteric and diffuse, and thus tried to create greater coherence and real-world relevance to the articles published. This was done through several editorial devices:

• – mini-symposiums of several articles clustered around a common theme;Footnote ¹

• – “Special Issues” on a wide range of topical subjects;Footnote ²

• – “Concepts and Methods” essays devoted to either theoretical or methodological issues in China studies;Footnote ³

• – “State of the Field” articles devoted to assessing the state of Chinese studies in different countries, regions, and disciplines;Footnote ⁴

• – thematic “Review Essays” of several books on similar topics;Footnote ⁵

• – “Research Notes” on very specific and narrow subjects;

• – translations of important Chinese (neibu) documents in the “Quarterly Chronicle and Documentation”;

• – a “Current Issues” analysis section pegged to very recent events (published immediately in the next issue);

• – pro-and-con “debates” on certain topical issues;Footnote ⁶

• – shortening the average length of articles from 8,000 to 5,000–6,000 words, while expanding the length of each issue to 300 pages (thus significantly expanding the opportunity to publish more articles).

All these new editorial formats were attempts to “liven up” the journal, give each issue greater intellectual coherence, and make the journal less “academic” and more relevant to those China watchers outside of the Academy (in government, journalism, business, etc.), as the potential “consumers” of The China Quarterly had proliferated into a variety of other professional sectors. But it was simultaneously an attempt to shape the discourse within the Academy in a less esoteric direction.

There was also an attempt to broaden geographic authorship and give new meaning to the journal's masthead: “an international journal for the study of China.” The China Quarterly had become too Anglo-American centric, at a time when global China studies were proliferating. In this spirit, the Editorial Board was expanded to include leading Sinologists in a wide variety of countries (many never before represented on the Board), and I proactively sought submissions from around the world. With our new publishers, Oxford University Press, we undertook an aggressive international advertising campaign to raise the journal's international image and subscriptions (which rebounded by 800 in five years), and endeavoured to tighten up the production process and bring the journal out on time.

Through all of these efforts I tried to reenergize The China Quarterly and make it truly the best in the business (despite increased competition from The China Journal, Journal of Contemporary China, and other journals).

Events in China

In terms of the subject content, China emerged during this period from its political paralysis and economic retrenchment in the aftermath of the Tiananmen events of 1989 to reignite “reform and opening” in the aftermath of Deng Xiaoping's “Southern Tour” of 1992.

Domestically, this was reflected in a series of articles on the expanding economy, relaxing society, and transitioning polity. In the leadership, the 14th Party Congress witnessed the consolidation of power by Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, and the marginalization of Li Peng. Jiang began to guide the Party and the nation towards the post-Deng era, while Li Peng was shunted off to the National People's Congress. With Zhu Rongji now installed as Premier, a number of the economic bottlenecks were tackled and explosive growth ensued. In particular, Zhu began the systematic dismantling of the haemorrhaging state industrial sector, while decisively moving China into the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Internationally, China emerged from the post-Tiananmen international isolation, restoring normal interactions with Europe and Japan. Relations with the United States, however, remained strained. Relations with Moscow were also stressed by the collapse of the Soviet Union and East European communist states. China's diplomacy during this period was thus concentrated on major powers and the developed world, as the developing world was not a priority for Beijing.

These and other phenomena received attention in The China Quarterly, while various new emphases – such as civil society – in the China field found expression its pages.

Trends in the field

It also became evident during my tenure as editor that scholars not only enjoyed an expanding choice of China journals in which to publish their work, but that many were beginning to submit their work to mainstream disciplinary journals (this was particularly true for younger scholars). Thus, The China Quarterly now operated in an increasingly “competitive” environment. The China Quarterly had to be proactive in order to get the best submissions, and it had to be efficient and timely in the review and publication process.

My time as editor was also one during which the first wave of Chinese émigré scholars received their doctoral degrees in the West and began their academic careers there. As a result, there was a spike in submitted articles by these young scholars, eager to make their mark in the field and gain academic tenure. On the whole, this was a positive development – but the quality of analysis and English of many articles was quite poor overall. Many were overly descriptive and not analytical, often tantalizing readers with supposedly secret or neibu sources (always lacking appropriate references), discussions of factional manoeuvrings in the Zhongnanhai, and frequent assertions without evidence. As a result, many such submissions were rejected.

Submissions to the journal during my editorship remained dominated by Americans, despite my active efforts to reach out to scholars in other nations. I was successful in generating some more submissions from the UK and continental Europe, but it was like pulling teeth to get anything from Asian nations (surprisingly including Japan), Russia, or elsewhere. This reflected a variety of factors, particularly many scholars not being comfortable writing in English, as well as the fact that China studies in most nations remained quite insular. It also reflected the tough peer review standards enforced by Editorial Board members (only about 20 per cent of 100+ submissions per annum were accepted for publication). This may well have had a “pre-emptive” impact on submissions from outside the Anglo-American world.

The insular nature of contemporary China studies

One question concerns the global nature of our enterprise. We must ask just how globalized is China studies really? To be sure, China is a global phenomenon today – active in ways and places it has never been before – but are contemporary China studies really globalized as well? How can The China Quarterly live up to its masthead mandate to be “an international journal for the study of China”?

When considering the academic field globally, we find that, in fact, contemporary China studies are not truly globalized and the health of the field is quite uneven and even endangered in several places. The field is heavily concentrated and well developed in North America (US and Canada), Australia, Japan, and South Korea. In these countries China studies are well established, well funded, and growing soundly. This has been covered elsewhere.Footnote ⁷ India, Mexico, Russia, and Vietnam all possess relatively small Sinological communities. In continental Europe, the situation is highly uneven.Footnote ⁸ While contemporary China studies in the UK has rebounded and reclaimed its reputation as the best in Europe (after a two-decade decline during the 1980s–1990s), in general my impression is that, when compared with a decade or two ago, contemporary China studies are static at best, in decline in some countries and non-existent in many others. This is a serious strategic challenge for the European Union, which needs to be addressed on a community-wide basis with central funding from Brussels.

Elsewhere in the world, contemporary China studies remains underdeveloped or entirely absent. In Southeast Asia it is concentrated in Vietnam (all in Hanoi) and Singapore, while there are a few specialists in Bangkok, Thailand and a small group in Djakarta, Indonesia. The field is altogether absent in Central Asia, West Asia, and the Middle East (the important exception being Egypt).Footnote ⁹ Curiously, it is non-existent in sub-Saharan Africa as well, outside of Stellenbosch University in South Africa (this is surprisingly given the number of African students educated in China over the years). Equally surprising is its absence in Latin and Central America – exceptions being the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico and Universidad Salvador in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

With the fragmentation of China studies globally it is little wonder that the field has not assumed a global identity. Under such conditions, The China Quarterly has an important role to play internationally by drawing China specialists out of their insular national cocoons and bringing their work to the attention of the broader global community. In addition to publishing articles in The China Quarterly, perhaps this could be done electronically by adding a link to The China Quarterly website where scholars can upload their (and others') articles according to various categories – thus creating a “global clearinghouse” of contemporary China scholarship. It would also be useful to encourage more “state of the field” articles. If we become more aware of China scholarship in different parts of the world, opportunities for collaboration among like-minded colleagues will open up. This leads to my second concern.

Lack of collaborative research

A second (and surprising) concern is the relative lack of joint collaborative research between foreign and Chinese scholars (the same can be said about the lack of collaborative work among Sinologists outside of China). To be sure, it occurs in some fields – e.g. economics and sociology – but, on the whole, there is a dearth of joint authorship. This is particularly surprising after more than three decades of scholarly exchanges with the Chinese academic and think tank communities. In short, scholarly exchanges have not resulted in much scholarly collaboration.

Thus, the reality is that the China field around the world is actually not as well linked to our Chinese counterparts as we may think, and thus Chinese scholars are not contributing to the mainstream global scholarly discourse about their own country (they are more comfortable writing in the parallel Chinese publications language internet discourse). The reverse also holds true: foreign scholars do not very often publish in Chinese journals. Moreover, scholars outside of China are equally not well linked to each other. In short, globalization has not really come to Chinese studies. Again, The China Quarterly could make a contribution to bridging these collaborative gaps – perhaps by creating a category specifically for collaborative articles.

Failure to generalize about China

My final observation on the state of the field today concerns it pervasive myopia and failure to generalize about “China.” The field is, in my view, far too micro-oriented in its foci and increasingly preoccupied with methodological concerns. China scholars today know “more and more about less and less” and see research methodologies as an end in itself rather than as a means to generate broader observations. Whatever the causes, the result has been an unfortunate losing of the forest for the trees.

Having deconstructed China over the past two decades in such considerable detail, scholars should begin to put the pieces of China back together again and offer generalizations about “China” writ large. There is no better place to do this than in the pages of The China Quarterly.

To be certain, establishing variance is the essence of social science – but so too should be identifying general patterns. When possible, Sinologists should ask themselves the “so what?” question, and should also engage in public education and policy advice as part of their civic duty as educators.

Looking back and looking forward

The above observations look back over my tenure as Editor of The China Quarterly, but also attempt to peer forward in time. The China Quarterly has enjoyed a remarkable run over the past half century and has contributed enormously to the global understanding of China and the development of the fields of modern and contemporary China studies. With such experience and wisdom under its belt, it is now just hitting its stride in mid-life. May it enjoy many more years of success and continue to be the leading international scholarly journal on contemporary China.