About Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University

Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University

The Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University in Fushun, Liaoning Province. Its Chinese title is Liaoning Shihua Daxue Xuebao, preserving in its name the university's former English rendering, Liaoning Shihua University. The journal is the comprehensive university journal of China's first petroleum school, an institution founded in 1950 to train specialists for the new China's oil industry and still headquartered in one of the country's historic oil and coal cities. It must be distinguished from the Journal of Petrochemical Universities — in Chinese, Shiyou Huagong Gaodeng Xuexiao Xuebao — which is a separate, multi-university petrochemical title also published from Fushun by the same institution's publishing operation. The two titles are related but different periodicals: the Journal of Petrochemical Universities is a specialist chemical-engineering journal shared across China's petrochemical universities, while the Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University is this university's own comprehensive xuebao, publishing across the whole range of its disciplines.

Fushun: oil, coal and the Hun River

Fushun is a prefecture-level city in east-central Liaoning, set on the Hun River east of Shenyang. It is one of the foundational industrial cities of modern China: a great coal-mining centre — its West Open-Pit Mine is among the largest open-pit coal mines in Asia — and a historic petroleum city, where oil was produced and refined from the early twentieth century and where shale oil was long extracted alongside coal. Fushun is also an old city in its own right, a Manchu homeland city near Xingjing, the early Manchu capital, and the place where the last Qing emperor, Puyi, was held at the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre after 1950. The university stands overlooking the scenic banks of the Hun River. For a petrochemical university, the location is a living laboratory: refineries, chemical plants, coal mines and energy research institutes surround the campus, and the city's industrial workforce and its environmental and economic transitions supply the questions that much of the university's — and therefore its journal's — research addresses.

The host university: New China's first petroleum school

Liaoning Petrochemical University was founded in Dalian in 1950 as the first petroleum industry school of New China. In 1953 it relocated to Fushun, the oil city, and in 1958 it was upgraded to Fushun Petroleum Institute, the name it carried for more than four decades. In February 2000 its governance was transferred from the national petrochemical corporation system to the People's Government of Liaoning Province, under the model of central-local co-construction with local management primary; in October 2000 the Fushun Coal Industry School was merged into it, uniting the city's petroleum and coal training traditions in one institution. In February 2002, with Ministry of Education approval, Fushun Petroleum Institute was renamed Liaoning Shihua University, and in February 2021 the institution took its present English name, Liaoning Petrochemical University. In March 2010 the Liaoning provincial government signed a co-construction agreement with the three great national oil companies — PetroChina, Sinopec and CNOOC — formalising the university's place in the national energy industry. Over more than seventy years it has educated well over a hundred thousand graduates, most of whom have taken up technical and managerial roles across China's petroleum, petrochemical and coal industries.

A petrochemical university in full

The university has grown from a single-industry school into a multidisciplinary institution featuring petroleum and petrochemical engineering, with eight coordinated disciplines: engineering, science, economics, management, literature, law, education and art. As of the early 2020s it comprised 18 colleges and nearly 60 undergraduate majors, with master's provision across 14 first-level disciplines and nine professional degree categories, together with joint doctoral training programmes. Its campus covers about 1.26 million square metres with a library of more than three million volumes, and it enrols more than 19,000 full-time students. Its specialist heart remains unmistakable: petrochemical technology, chemical engineering, oil and gas storage and transportation, mechanical engineering for the process industries, and information and control engineering for plant automation. The university maintains a joint petrochemical laboratory with the Sinopec Fushun Petrochemical Research Institute and the Liaoning branch of China Huanqiu Contracting and Engineering Corporation, embedding its research in the working industry of its host city. This breadth-with-a-centre is exactly what its comprehensive journal reflects.

Two journals from one publishing house

The university's own institutional summaries note that it publishes two journals: the Journal of Petrochemical Universities and the Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University. The distinction between them is the key to this profile. The Journal of Petrochemical Universities, founded under the Fushun Petroleum Institute, is a specialist, nationally oriented science-and-technology core journal in chemical engineering, energy and fuel technology, drawing authorship from petrochemical universities across China. The Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University — Liaoning Shihua Daxue Xuebao — is the institution's own university journal, the general xuebao in which the university's scholars across all eight of its disciplines publish: petrochemical and mechanical engineering, yes, but also economics and management of the energy industries, law, literature, education and the social sciences. Treating the two as one title, as some directories do, erases both: the specialist journal loses its national, multi-university character, and the university journal loses its comprehensive, institutional one. They are catalogued separately, cited separately and edited for different purposes.

What the university journal publishes

As a comprehensive xuebao, the Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University carries the full spread of its host's work. Its engineering and science pages publish research arising from the university's laboratories and industry partnerships: refining and petrochemical processes, catalysis and materials, equipment and control for process plants, and the safety and environmental engineering on which the modern industry depends. Its social-science and humanities pages publish on the economics and management of energy enterprises, on regional development in a resource-based city, on law and policy for the energy sector, on foreign languages and literature from the university's language programmes, and on education. For the university's own staff — especially younger scholars and those working in the non-engineering disciplines of a petrochemical university — the journal is the home venue in which peer-reviewed Chinese-language publication is most directly connected to their institution. Its contents circulate through China's national academic databases, the standard route by which university-journal research is found and cited.

Research in a resource-city transition

Fushun, like many of China's resource-based cities, has been working through the long transition that follows the decline of its original extractive economy: coal reserves depleting, the great open pit closing a chapter of mining history, and the city seeking new industries while managing land subsidence, mine rehabilitation and environmental repair. A university rooted in the city's petroleum and coal schools is a natural research centre for this transition, and its journal is a natural record of it. Studies of resource-city economics, of industrial heritage and land reclamation, of energy-sector restructuring and of the social consequences of industrial change belong to the scholarly territory in which Liaoning Petrochemical University works and in which its xuebao publishes. This gives the journal a significance beyond its campus: it documents, from inside, how one of China's oldest oil and coal cities understands and manages its own transformation.

The journal and the national energy industry

The university's co-construction by Liaoning Province together with PetroChina, Sinopec and CNOOC is unusual among provincial universities and signals its continuing national role: it remains a base for training the urgently needed graduates of Liaoning's petrochemical industry and a recognised supplier of engineers to the national energy sector. Its journal participates in that role in print. The engineering research published in the university's periodicals is read within an industry that the university has served since 1950, longer than any other Chinese petroleum school; the Fushun publishing operation's specialist title is a core journal in its field, and the comprehensive journal stands alongside it as the institution's general scholarly record. Together they make Fushun — not a provincial capital and not a coastal metropolis — a genuine centre of Chinese petrochemical scholarly publishing, a status the city owes entirely to the school that moved there in 1953.

Why the journal matters

The Journal of Liaoning Petrochemical University matters because it is the comprehensive scholarly journal of a historically unique institution: the first petroleum school of New China, founded in Dalian in 1950, rooted in Fushun since 1953, bearer of the Fushun Petroleum Institute name for over forty years, and today a multidisciplinary university of more than 19,000 students co-built by a province and three national oil companies. Its journal publishes that university in full — petrochemical engineering and process science alongside energy economics, law, languages and education — and it stands in documented partnership and necessary distinction with the separate, specialist Journal of Petrochemical Universities published from the same city. For readers of Chinese energy-sector scholarship, and for anyone tracing how China's oil industry educated itself, the Fushun university journal is a primary record written by the industry's own oldest school.