About Journal of Changchun University of Science and Technology

Journal of Changchun University of Science and Technology

Overview and identity

The Journal of Changchun University of Science and Technology is the Chinese-language academic journal of Changchun University of Science and Technology in Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province, Northeast China. Its Chinese title is Changchun Ligong Daxue Xuebao, and it appears in natural-science and social-science editions, following the pattern adopted by China's larger technological universities for their house journals, or xuebao. No International Standard Serial Number was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. The journal's identity is inseparable from the extraordinary specialisation of its host. Changchun University of Science and Technology was founded in 1958 under the Chinese Academy of Sciences as an institution devoted to optics, and it remains known across China as the cradle of the country's optical talent. Its journal is therefore, at its core, the publishing record of China's historic school of optical engineering, set within the comprehensive output of a modern science and technology university.

Founded in 1958: an optics institute for a new China

The university was founded in 1958 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, formerly known as the Changchun College, or Institute, of Optics and Fine Mechanics. It was the first institution of higher learning in New China established to train optical professionals, created at a moment when the young People's Republic urgently needed its own specialists in optical instruments for science, industry and national defence. University accounts record the instruction behind the foundation, conveyed through Vice Premier Nie Rongzhen, that a university should be established mainly to cultivate optical talents for national defence. The school was affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Sciences alongside the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, the Academy's great optics research institute in the same city, and Guo Moruo, the president of the Academy, wrote the institution's name in his own hand. From the beginning, teaching and frontier research stood side by side: the college's library, for example, was founded in 1958 simultaneously with the university itself. The journal the university publishes today descends from this founding settlement, in which scholarship and publication were built into the institution from its first year.

Wang Daheng and the founding generation

The founder and first president of the university was Wang Daheng (1915–2011), the optical physicist universally described as the father of Chinese optical engineering. Wang was a founding academician of both the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and the founder of the Chinese Optical Society. In Changchun he had already, from 1951–52, founded the Academy's institute of optics, where his teams produced China's first batch of optical glass, its first electronic microscope and its first laser, ending the country's dependence on foreign optical glass. In 1958 he founded the university to cultivate the researchers and engineers the new field required, serving as both its president and a professor. Around him gathered a founding generation of comparable distinction: Gong Zutong, the developer of China's first optical glass; Wang Zhijiang, the developer of China's first laser; and Xue Mingqiu, the developer of China's first high-precision theodolite. University sources record that 16 academicians have taught or studied at the school. The International Astronomical Union later named an asteroid for Wang Daheng. A journal edited at this university publishes in the house that these scientists built, and its optics content carries their institutional inheritance.

From institute to university: 2002 and after

For more than four decades the institution developed as the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, with a brief early episode in 1959–60 when it was merged with neighbouring institutes and carried the names Jilin Institute of Science and Technology and Jilin University of Science and Technology, before the optics institute's name was restored. In February 1965 it was separated from the research institute of the same name and became a university directly under the Chinese Academy of Sciences in its own right. The modern name arrived on 4 April 2002, when, with the approval of the Ministry of Education, the institute was renamed Changchun University of Science and Technology, and academician Wang Daheng himself wrote the new name. In the same year the university successfully established optical engineering as a national key discipline. In 2004 it was identified as a provincial key university of Jilin. In 2009 came a distinction no other Chinese university holds: the Changchun China Optical Science and Technology Museum, the country's only state-level optical science and technology museum, was approved for construction and placed under the university's management. The journal's title followed the institution through these changes, taking its present name in 2002.

The university today: the cradle of China's optical talent

Changchun University of Science and Technology is known throughout Chinese higher education as the cradle of China's optical talents, and it has trained more than 200,000 professional and technical personnel since its establishment. Its defining discipline is optical engineering, which was rated in the A class in the fourth round of the national discipline evaluation, ranked alongside the programmes of far larger national universities and described in educational reporting as unique among provincial universities. The university pioneered several domestic programmes, including infrared technology, laser technology and optical materials engineering, maintaining leading advantages across optoelectronic education. Its research infrastructure includes the national key laboratory system for high-power semiconductor lasers, and its faculty includes members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Alongside optics, the university has grown into a broader science and technology institution with mechanical engineering, computer science, materials and other engineering fields, together with the humanities and social sciences that its social-science journal edition serves. Provincial planning has selected optical engineering, mechanical engineering and computer science among the disciplines it supports toward world-class standing.

The journal's editions and what they publish

The natural-science edition of the Journal of Changchun University of Science and Technology is the university's principal house record of its engineering and scientific research. Optics and optoelectronics stand at its head: optical engineering, photoelectric technology, lasers, optical materials and precision instruments are the fields in which the university's faculty publish with a depth no other provincial institution can match. Around that core, the edition carries mechanical engineering, computer science, materials science and the university's other scientific disciplines. The social-science edition carries the humanities, management, law and social research of a university that, for all its technical fame, educates across a much wider front. Together the two editions present the full scholarly output of the institution to the Chinese research community. For a reader interested in the history of Chinese science, the journal has an additional value: it is the house periodical of the institution founded by Wang Daheng, and its pages document, decade by decade, how the school that created China's optical profession developed that profession's research.

Changchun: China's optics city

The journal's home, Changchun, is not merely a provincial capital that happens to host an optics university; it is the city where Chinese optics was born. The Chinese Academy of Sciences placed its institute of optics there in the early 1950s, Wang Daheng built both institute and university there, and the city's identity in Chinese science is bound up with optical research, alongside its fame as a centre of the automobile industry and of higher education in the Northeast. The university's management of the national optical science and technology museum, located in Changchun, underlines the point: the institution is the public custodian of the whole field's history in China. A journal published from this base speaks to a national community of optical scientists and engineers, many of them trained in Changchun itself, as well as to the university's own faculties. Its regional setting in Jilin, one of the old industrial provinces of the Northeast, also gives its applied engineering research a practical orientation toward the manufacturing base of the region it serves.

Distinguishing the journal from other Changchun titles

Changchun hosts many universities, and their journals are easily confused, so this title's identity should be stated plainly. The Journal of Changchun University of Science and Technology, Changchun Ligong Daxue Xuebao, is published by the optics-founded university established in 1958 by the Chinese Academy of Sciences under Wang Daheng. It is not the journal of Changchun University of Technology, a different Changchun institution with an engineering history of its own, nor of Changchun Normal University or of Northeast Normal University, the other large Changchun universities whose journals appear elsewhere in this directory. The identifying marks of the present title are its host's former name, the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, its 2002 renaming, and its two-edition structure serving a science and technology university. Citations to the Changchun Ligong Daxue Xuebao in optics and engineering literature refer to this university's periodical, the house journal of the cradle of China's optical talent.

The xuebao tradition and the journal's place in it

Within the family of Chinese university journals, most xuebao are generalist records of comprehensive institutions; this journal is something rarer, the house periodical of a great specialisation. Its university was created for one field, optics, at the direction of the state and under the leadership of the field's founder in China, and although it has broadened into a full science and technology university, optics remains its A-class crown. A journal of such an institution carries a double duty: it records the general research of the university community, and it preserves the scholarly output of a discipline whose Chinese history is substantially the history of this single school and its sister research institute. The founding generation's achievements, the first optical glass, the first laser, the first high-precision theodolite, are the background against which its current articles on optoelectronics are read by Chinese scholars. That continuity, from 1958 to the present, is what gives the journal its standing beyond the ordinary run of provincial university periodicals.

Reading the journal today

For a first-time reader, the Journal of Changchun University of Science and Technology is best approached as the publishing record of China's school of optics. Its natural-science edition shows the current research of the institution that trained much of the country's optical workforce, while its social-science edition shows the wider life of a modern technological university in Northeast China. The journal is published in Chinese, and its primary audience is the Chinese scholarly and engineering community. No ISSN is claimed in this profile, because none was attested in the sources consulted. The verified facts of the title are distinctive enough without it: a two-edition university journal published in Changchun by the university founded in 1958 by Wang Daheng, the father of Chinese optical engineering, renamed in 2002, and still recognised as the cradle of China's optical talent.