About Journal of Huaqiao University (Natural Science Edition)

Journal of Huaqiao University (Natural Science Edition)

Overview and identity

The Journal of Huaqiao University (Natural Science Edition) is the Chinese-language natural-science journal of Huaqiao University, published in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. Its Chinese title is Huaqiao Daxue Xuebao Ziran Kexue Ban, and it carries the ISSN 1000-5013, the identifier under which its articles are cited in international scholarly and technical literature — a 2011 article in its pages on triptycene-based polyimides, for example, is recorded in a European patent citation as volume 32, issue 5, pages 532 to 536, with exactly this ISSN. The journal's volume numbering reached Volume 43 in 2022, indicating a continuous publication history extending back over decades. In the Chinese xuebao system, the journal's role is to publish peer-reviewed research from the university's science and engineering community, together with contributions from researchers elsewhere in the same fields.

The Natural Science Edition is one half of a divided flagship. Huaqiao University also publishes a Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition, a separate title with its own editorial identity and identifier, which was the edition covered in earlier rounds of this directory. The two editions share a university and a Chinese title stem, but they publish entirely different disciplines, and cataloguers and readers must keep them apart: an article on structural engineering belongs to the Natural Science Edition, while an article on overseas Chinese history or Chinese linguistics belongs to its social-science counterpart.

The publisher: a university for overseas Chinese

Huaqiao University has one of the most distinctive founding stories of any Chinese university. It was founded in Quanzhou in 1960, with the approval of Premier Zhou Enlai, expressly to provide higher education in their ancestral homeland for students of overseas Chinese background — from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and from the Chinese diaspora in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and beyond. Its very name, Huaqiao, means overseas Chinese, and official university histories note that it was the first institution of higher education in China to be named for them. Liao Chengzhi, the senior leader responsible for overseas Chinese affairs, served as its first president.

The university's history was not uninterrupted. It was suspended in 1970, during the Cultural Revolution period, and reopened in 1978. In 1983 it was listed by the central government as a key university receiving special support. Since the 1990s it has been jointly supported by the national overseas Chinese affairs authorities and the Fujian Provincial Government, and it is now directly affiliated with the United Front Work Department of the CPC Central Committee. Its stated mission, repeated across its official materials, is to serve overseas Chinese and to spread Chinese culture — a mission that gives the university, and indirectly its journals, an international orientation unusual among provincial institutions.

Two campuses: Quanzhou and Xiamen

The university today works from two campuses in Fujian's two great historic port cities. The original Quanzhou campus stands in a city famous as a hometown of overseas Chinese and as a historic starting point of the Maritime Silk Road. In 2006 a second campus was inaugurated in Xiamen, another coastal city with deep diaspora ties and one of China's earliest special economic zones. University descriptions explain the division of labour between them: the Quanzhou campus hosts most of the humanities, social sciences and management programmes, while most of the engineering programmes are situated on the Xiamen campus. The journal's postal identity remains Quanzhou, its founding city, but much of the laboratory work it publishes now originates in Xiamen's engineering colleges.

The scale of the institution behind the journal is considerable. Official accounts describe 27 or more colleges, dozens of research institutes, and a graduate body that includes several thousand overseas students from dozens of countries and regions. Across its history the university counts its graduates in the hundreds of thousands, with a large share — tens of thousands — from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas. For a natural-science journal, that community matters less for its articles' subject matter than for its reach: Huaqiao publications circulate in a university whose alumni and partner institutions are spread across Southeast Asia and the wider Chinese-speaking world.

Scope: civil engineering and architecture

Civil engineering is the journal's most historically rooted field. Huaqiao University's College of Civil Engineering was established in 1964, only four years after the university itself, began enrolling master's students in 1982 and doctoral students in 2003, and moved to the Xiamen campus in 2006. It works through departments of civil engineering, construction management, municipal engineering and geotechnical engineering, and its civil engineering discipline is recognised as a first-class discipline of Fujian Province. Its researchers work on steel and concrete structures, earthquake resistance and disaster prevention, structural performance evaluation and construction management — precisely the kind of applied structural and geotechnical research that fills the pages of a comprehensive engineering xuebao.

Architecture stands alongside civil engineering in the scope, reflecting the university's College of Architecture, which teaches architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. In a university whose students and alumni span China's coastal cities and Southeast Asia, architectural research has a natural regional canvas: the historic urban fabric of Quanzhou and Xiamen, the building traditions of the Minnan region, and the rapid urban construction of modern Fujian. The pairing of architecture with civil engineering in one journal mirrors the way the two professions collaborate in practice, on the same buildings and the same cities.

Scope: materials, chemistry and information engineering

Materials science and engineering form the second major strand. Huaqiao's materials researchers achieved the university's first paper in the journal Nature in 2018, on perovskite light-emitting diodes, from the College of Materials Science and Engineering, and the journal's own pages have long carried polymer and materials chemistry of the kind cited in the patent literature mentioned above. University reporting places its engineering discipline in the top five-thousandth of the global ESI rankings, with chemistry, materials science and computer science in the top one percent — the same cluster of fields that dominates this journal's scope.

Chemistry and chemical engineering, and information engineering, complete the stated scope. The university's chemical engineering community works across chemical processes, bioengineering and environmental topics, while its information science and engineering community covers electronics, electrical and communication engineering, automation and applied physics, and its computer science community adds software and computing research. Together these fields make the Natural Science Edition a general science-and-engineering journal rather than a single-discipline title: a single issue can move from a structural mechanics paper to a materials synthesis, a chemical process study and an information-engineering algorithm, each refereed within the university's own specialist colleges.

Fujian's qiaoxiang setting

Quanzhou and Xiamen are both qiaoxiang — ancestral hometowns of overseas Chinese — and that identity shapes the university in ways that reach even its science publishing. Huaqiao University is a national base for Chinese language and culture education, maintains partnerships with hundreds of overseas Chinese schools, and educates an unusually international student body for a Fujian institution. Its science and engineering, meanwhile, serve a province of ports, manufacturing and construction. The journal sits at the meeting point of those two characters: a technically conventional Chinese university journal, published by an institution whose wider mission is anything but parochial.

The journal in China's university-journal system

Within China's publishing landscape, the xuebao of a nationally supported comprehensive university is a standard but important institution. It records the host university's research output in Chinese for a domestic specialist readership, provides a peer-reviewed outlet close to the laboratories that produce the work, and accumulates, volume by volume, into an archive of the institution's scientific development — in this case an archive reaching its forty-third volume in 2022. Because the journal publishes in Chinese, discovery runs mainly through Chinese scholarly databases and library catalogues, where the ISSN 1000-5013 and the full edition-specific title are the reliable keys; the abbreviated citation form, Huaqiao Daxue Xuebao, is shared with the social-science edition and should always be read with its edition marker.

Distinguishing the edition

The journal's full bibliographic identity is: Journal of Huaqiao University (Natural Science Edition); Chinese title Huaqiao Daxue Xuebao Ziran Kexue Ban; ISSN 1000-5013; language Chinese; place of publication Quanzhou, Fujian; publisher Huaqiao University. It must be distinguished from the university's Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition, a separate title covered separately in this directory, and from the similarly romanised journals of other institutions — notably Huazhong University of Science and Technology, whose journal's name differs by only a few letters in pinyin but belongs to a different university in a different province.

Readership and use

The edition's core readers are researchers, engineers, architects and graduate students in civil engineering, materials, chemistry, information engineering and architecture, primarily within China and especially in Fujian, together with Huaqiao University's own postgraduate community across its two campuses. For engineers and architects working in the Minnan region, it offers locally produced studies of structures, materials and urban building in Fujian's coastal conditions. For bibliographers and scholars of Chinese higher education, it is the science half of the publishing record of China's overseas-Chinese university — a journal whose forty-plus volumes chart how an institution founded in 1960 for diaspora education built, and documented, a substantial science and engineering enterprise.