About Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Overview and identity

The Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies is the Chinese-language university journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS) in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. It is listed among the university's own journals on the university's official English site, where it appears alongside Modern Foreign Languages — the university's famous linguistics journal — as one of the academic journals through which GDUFS presents its research. The university's own profiles count it among the small group of GDUFS journals described as being of national impact.

The journal publishes across the fields that define its university: foreign linguistics and literature, international trade and economics, law and cross-cultural studies. That combination is the journal's identity. Guangdong University of Foreign Studies was created to unite a foreign-languages institute with a foreign-trade institute, and its university journal unites the same two inheritances between one set of covers — language and literature on one side, trade, economics and law on the other.

The sponsoring university: a merger of languages and trade

Guangdong University of Foreign Studies was formed in 1995 by merging the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages and the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Trade. The foreign languages institute had been established in November 1964 and began enrolling students in July 1965, under the direct jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education; it was one of the three renowned institutes of foreign languages in China, offering English, German, French and Spanish from its first enrolment. The foreign trade institute was founded in December 1980, directly under the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation, as one of the first institutions in China to offer an academic programme in international economy and trade.

The two institutes were transferred to Guangdong Province in September 1994 and January 1995 respectively, and in May 1995 the Guangdong Provincial People's Government merged them to establish Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. In October 2008 the Guangdong College of Finance and Economics was incorporated into the university as well. The journal of this university is thus the periodical of an institution deliberately constructed at the meeting point of language and commerce — the two competences China's opening to the world most required.

Among the university's journals of national impact

GDUFS publishes a small family of academic journals that its profiles describe as being of national, in later accounts international or national, impact: Modern Foreign Languages, International Economics and Trade Research, the Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, the Journal of Strategy and Decision-Making, and in more recent listings Asia-Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies. The Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies sits in that company as the university's general journal — the title that carries the breadth of the institution, while its siblings carry specialisms.

The distinction matters for understanding the journal's role. Modern Foreign Languages is a specialist flagship for linguistics; International Economics and Trade Research is a specialist flagship for trade economics. The university journal, by contrast, is where the institution's whole scholarly range appears together — foreign linguistics and literature beside international trade and economics, law and cross-cultural studies — presenting GDUFS to the Chinese academic world as a complete university rather than as a set of departments.

Scope: foreign linguistics and literature

Foreign linguistics and literature form the journal's first field, inherited from the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages of 1964. GDUFS teaches and researches in more foreign languages than almost any institution in southern China, supported by a library whose resources span sixteen foreign languages, and its linguistics community is anchored by a national key research centre for humanities and social sciences. Scholarship in linguistics and in the literatures of the languages the university teaches appears in the journal as the record of that community's breadth, beyond the theoretical linguistics concentrated in Modern Foreign Languages.

Cross-cultural studies, the journal's fourth named field, grows from the same root. A university whose students spend their degrees inside other languages and cultures produces scholarship on how cultures meet — in translation, in literature, in education and in international communication — and the journal provides its venue. In Guangzhou, historically China's great point of contact with the outside world, such studies have a local archive of four centuries of exchange to draw upon.

Scope: international trade, economics and law

International trade and economics form the journal's second inheritance, from the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Trade of 1980. That institute was created to train the specialists of China's new foreign trade, and its successor university remains a centre for research on international trade and on the economy of Guangdong — China's largest provincial economy and its historic trading gateway. Economic research published in the journal addresses the trade and development questions of that setting, complementing the specialist treatment of the same fields in International Economics and Trade Research.

Law completes the journal's named scope, reflecting the university's development of legal studies oriented, like everything at GDUFS, toward the international: the law of trade, of international transactions and of cross-border relations studied in a university where law students learn alongside linguists and economists. The pairing of law with linguistics and trade in a single journal is a fair miniature of the university's curriculum, and of the professional world — the Canton Fair city of contracts, negotiations and translation — for which it trains its graduates.

Guangzhou and the Greater Bay Area setting

The journal is published in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong, a national central city and a core city of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. The university operates three campuses — the Baiyun Mountain (North) Campus at the foot of Baiyun Mountain, the University Town (South) Campus in the Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center, and the Dalang Campus — across a total area recorded at 153 hectares. Guangzhou has been China's southern gateway for two millennia, the home of the Canton trade system and of the Canton Fair, and it remains the commercial capital of the south.

A university journal in this city, published by its foreign-studies university, documents scholarship produced at China's interface with the world. The research the journal carries — on foreign languages, on trade, on the law and culture of international exchange — is the academic counterpart of the city's economic function, and the university's inclusion in international rankings and its designation as a high-level university with major development support in Guangdong underline the standing of the institution behind it.

The university's research environment

GDUFS supports its journals with a substantial research infrastructure: a national key research centre for humanities and social sciences, provincial key research centres, and the Guangdong Research Institute on International Strategies, which serves as a think tank for the provincial government. Its scholars work across foreign languages and cultures, foreign economic and trade studies and international strategic studies — the three research identities the university claims in its own profiles. The Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies draws on all three, which is why its scope, unusually for a university journal, reaches from linguistics to strategic trade and law.

The journal also serves the university's teaching mission indirectly, as the visible standard of its scholarship. An institution that grew from fewer than five thousand students at the 1995 merger to tens of thousands within two decades built its academic reputation substantially through its journals; the university journal, catalogued among the titles of national impact in the university's own descriptions, is part of that reputation's documentary evidence.

A general journal among specialists

Chinese universities commonly publish both specialist journals and a general university journal, and GDUFS is a clear example of the pattern at its most developed. Its specialist titles are nationally known; its general journal, the Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, performs the complementary task of representing the whole institution. For external readers — other universities, libraries, evaluators — it is the single title in which the university's dual inheritance of languages and trade can be seen operating together.

That representational role gives the journal a significance beyond its individual articles. It is the periodical in which Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, as a corporate scholarly body descended from the institutes of 1964 and 1980 and merged in 1995, speaks in its own name.

Readership

The journal's readers are scholars and students in foreign linguistics and literature, international trade and economics, law and cross-cultural studies, in GDUFS and across China, together with the wider community concerned with foreign-language education and China's international exchange. Its Chinese-language pages serve that domestic readership, and its listing among the university's journals on its official English site presents it to international visitors as part of the university's scholarly identity.

Catalogued as the Journal of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and published in Guangzhou, Guangdong, by a university formed in 1995 from the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages (1964) and the Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Trade (1980), the journal stands as the general scholarly record of China's southern university of foreign studies — language, literature, trade, law and culture between one set of covers.