About Chinese Journal of Sociology

Chinese Journal of Sociology

Overview and identity

Chinese Journal of Sociology is a peer-reviewed international quarterly journal of sociology, published in English by SAGE Publications in partnership with Shanghai University, Shanghai, China, and co-sponsored with the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University. The English-language edition was established in 2015, its first issue published in March 2015. It is identified by print ISSN 2057-150X and online ISSN 2057-1518. The journal covers social stratification, migration, urbanization, family and social governance in contemporary China.

The journal is the English edition of one of China's historic sociology titles. Its Chinese parent journal, Shehui (Society), was established in 1981 as the first sociological journal founded after the restoration of the discipline of sociology in mainland China in 1979 — a lineage that makes this young English quarterly the international face of a title older than the People's Republic's modern sociology itself.

A lineage from 1981: the Chinese parent journal

Sociology was abolished as a discipline in China in the 1950s and restored in 1979. The Chinese Journal of Sociology's parent was founded in 1981 by Shanghai University — then a branch of Fudan University — and immediately became a forum for sociologists to exchange ideas. In its early years, however, it was not yet a professional journal: research accounts of the period note that professional sociological research formed only a small part of its papers in the 1980s, the majority being short essays, opinion pieces and news reports, and the journal suffered interruption in the late 1980s before its modern professional form emerged.

After revision in 2005, the Chinese journal became the professional title its community recognises today, presenting leading work in theory-building and empirical research on China's social change and development, promoting academic norms and dialogue between sociology and other social sciences. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' account records its honours: inclusion in the Chinese Core Journals and as a CSSCI source journal, selection by EBSCO, the Second Chinese Government Award for Publishing nomination for journals in 2011, and selection in the Famous Journal Project of the Ministry of Education. The Chinese edition is administered by the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, sponsored by Shanghai University, published bimonthly from Shanghai (postcode 200444), with Li Youmei recorded as its editor-in-chief in the academy's listing. The English edition of 2015 was built on that foundation — SAGE's announcement describes it explicitly as “the new English language edition of the Chinese Journal of Sociology.”

The English edition: SAGE, Shanghai and Princeton

The English edition rests on a three-way partnership documented by Princeton's Center on Contemporary China: SAGE Publications and Shanghai University partnered to publish it, co-sponsored with the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University. The editor-in-chief appointed at launch was Professor Yu Xie, the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Sociology and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies at Princeton University — one of the most prominent sociologists of contemporary China in the world — with Associate Professor Xiulin Sun of the School of Sociology of Shanghai University as vice chief editor.

That editorial arrangement states the journal's purpose in institutional form: a Chinese university's historic journal, edited from the summit of the international China-sociology profession, published by a major international social-science house. The journal's stated aim is to build an academic platform for in-depth discussion of the issues facing contemporary Chinese society from sociological perspectives.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal publishes original research articles, theoretical essays and critical reviews, engaging both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. Its scope spans the core of the sociology of contemporary China: social stratification and inequality, social movements and governance, cultural and ideological change, migration and urbanization, family and demographic trends, environmental sociology, and social security and public policy.

Its special collections, visible on the SAGE platform, show the scope in operation: collections on the complex dynamics of contemporary labor markets, on gender studies, on space and migration, and on governance in contemporary China. Yu Xie's opening editorial of March 2015 — free access on the platform — set the founding tone. These are the organising problems of a society that urbanised, industrialised and aged faster than any before it, and the journal's franchise is to treat them with the full methodological apparatus of international sociology.

Publication pattern

The English journal is published quarterly — four issues a year — by SAGE Publications, with articles published online first on the SAGE Journals platform and collected into issues. Its first issue appeared in March 2015, and the platform's archive runs continuously from that issue forward, with editorials and collections openly flagged where free access applies. The Chinese parent journal, by contrast, is a bimonthly; the two editions are parallel publications of one journal family, not translations of a single issue stream, and each is cited under its own ISSNs.

For citation the English edition's identifiers are print ISSN 2057-150X and online ISSN 2057-1518, publisher SAGE Publications Ltd, frequency four issues per year, coverage from 2015. Records showing a Shanghai bimonthly with earlier decades of history belong to the Chinese edition and its own identifiers.

Editorial leadership and scholarly community

Yu Xie's editorship connects the journal to the quantitative, demographically grounded tradition of China sociology that he has led — stratification, mobility, family and the social consequences of China's reforms studied with survey data and formal methods. Xiulin Sun's vice-editorship anchors the journal in Shanghai University's School of Sociology, the institutional home of the Chinese edition and a significant centre of urban sociology in China.

The co-sponsorship of Princeton's Wythes Center on Contemporary China — the university centre devoted to the study of contemporary China — further locates the journal inside the transnational community of China sociologists, whose members in China, North America and Europe form its natural authorship and readership. Few journals anywhere are so deliberately constructed as a bridge: Chinese institutional ownership, international editorship, a Western scholarly co-sponsor and a global commercial publisher.

Place among journals of Chinese sociology

English-language sociology of China is served by a small set of journals with distinct identities: the Chinese Sociological Review (Routledge, descended from Chinese Sociology & Anthropology of 1968, centred at NYU Shanghai), the open-access Journal of Chinese Sociology (Springer), and this journal. The Chinese Journal of Sociology is distinguished by descent: it is the only one that is the English edition of a Chinese discipline's own founding journal, carrying the Shanghai title's name, history and institutional loyalty into English.

Within China, its parent remains, with Sociological Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one of the two most influential journals of the discipline — the pairing identified in historical studies of Chinese sociology's professionalisation between 1979 and 2000. The English edition extends that standing to the international conversation.

Indexing and discovery

The journal is published and distributed on the SAGE Journals platform (journals.sagepub.com/home/chs), which carries its complete archive from March 2015, its special collections and its most-read and most-cited articles. Princeton's Center on Contemporary China maintains a journal page describing the partnership. International directory records list the title under SAGE Publications Ltd with ISSN 2057-150X and quarterly frequency from 2015 — a clean, unambiguous bibliographic identity for a young journal, with none of the title-change complications that mark older titles in this batch.

Readership and use

Readers are sociologists of China worldwide, China-studies scholars in adjacent disciplines, and the Chinese sociological community publishing for an international audience. For a researcher entering the field, the journal's collections — labor markets, gender, space and migration, governance — function as curated entry points into the contemporary literature, edited by figures central to that literature. For the discipline's historians, the journal is also a document in itself: the moment China's oldest sociology journal acquired an English edition marks the internationalisation of Chinese sociology as plainly as any statistic.

Continuing role

From a Shanghai journal founded in 1981, in the first years of a restored discipline, to a SAGE-published international quarterly edited from Princeton and Shanghai under ISSN 2057-150X and 2057-1518, the Chinese Journal of Sociology has carried one title across the entire modern history of Chinese sociology. Its English edition, established in 2015, continues as the discipline's own bridge to the world — contemporary Chinese society, studied sociologically, published from Shanghai University in partnership with SAGE and Princeton's Wythes Center.