The Journal of Contemporary China (JCC) is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2011. As a U.S.-based leading international
journal, the JCC was established in the early 1990s to fill the voids in the Western
studies of contemporary China. It is now meeting the new challenges of scholarly
and policy studies of a rising China in the 21st century.
Two areas of the China study infrastructure in the United States was--until recently--somewhat weak for a while. One weakness was the absence of a comprehensive and interdisciplinary journal of china studies based in the United States. The second weakness is the lack of scholarly and policy oriented journals that can build a bridge between the Western mainstream scholarship and policy research and the increasingly sophisticated and rich Chinese scholarship and research.
These weaknesses were to an extent corrected with the birth of the JCC which covers a broad range of subjects, including economics, political science, law, culture, history, foreign affairs, sociology, literature, and other fields of social sciences and humanities and attracted scholarly and policy research submissions from scholars and policy analysts around the world, including both mainstream Western scholars and Chinese scholars. Listing in almost all major indexes, including the Social Sciences Citation Index, the JCC published three issues per year when it was first founded in the 1990s and became quarterly in 2001. The publication frequency was increased to five issues per year in 2008 and will become a bimonthly (six issues per year) in 2012.
The JCC is currently edited from the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies in the United States. Founded in the early 1990s, the JCC has seen itself as meeting the challenges of contemporary China studies in the twenty-first century.
The JCC has tried to facilitate the integration of traditional sinology and contemporary social sciences and an equal conversation between Chinese scholars and their Western colleagues to promote the contribution of Chinese scholars to mainstream international scholarship. These are challenges that may help lay a foundation for establishing a new standard for scholarship in the twenty-first century that will demonstrate competence in integrating the analytic literature of Chinese and Western discourses.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Journal of Contemporary China, 20 articles were selected for free online access at a specially designed anniversary celebration website.
-Suisheng Zhao is founder and editor of the Journal of Contemporary China and Professor and Executive Director of the Center for China-U.S. Cooperation at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. A member of the Board of Governors of the U.S. Committee of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Pacific, and a jianzhi professor at Beijing University, Renmin University, Fudan University and Shanghai Foreign Studies University. He is the author and editor of ten books. His most recent books are: China and the United States, Cooperation and Competition in Northeast Asia, China-U.S. Relations Transformed: Perspectives and Strategic Interactions, Debating Political Reform in China: Rule of Law versus Democratization, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism.
