About Journal of Hainan Tropical Ocean University

Journal of Hainan Tropical Ocean University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Hainan Tropical Ocean University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Hainan Tropical Ocean University in Sanya, Hainan Province. Its Chinese title is Hainan Redai Haiyang Xueyuan Xuebao, following the standard pattern of the Chinese university journal, or xuebao. The journal is attested under that title in international scholarship: a 2017 article in its first volume of the new series, by Li Caixia, traced the evolution of the South China Sea route books, the genglubu, from navigation guides to fishery guides — a piece of maritime folk-history scholarship squarely in the journal's home territory. No International Standard Serial Number was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. Identification requires care, because Hainan has several universities: this journal belongs to Hainan Tropical Ocean University, the former Qiongzhou University of Wuzhishan and Sanya, and it is distinct from the journals of Hainan University and Hainan Normal University in Haikou, covered earlier in this directory, and from Hainan University's Journal of Tropical Biology, a separate specialist title.

The host university: Li and Miao normal schools of the 1950s

The university's predecessors were two teacher-training institutions of the Hainan Li and Miao autonomous area, then administered from Guangdong: the Hainan Li and Miao Autonomous Prefecture Normal School, founded in 1954, and the Hainan Li and Miao Autonomous Prefecture Teachers' College, founded in 1958. After several divisions, adjustments and name changes, the Hainan Tongshi Normal College and the Hainan Tongshi Education College merged in 1993 to form Qiongzhou College, a junior-college-level institution based in Wuzhishan, in the mountainous centre of Hainan island. In 2006 it was upgraded to undergraduate status and renamed Qiongzhou University, also rendered Qiongzhou College in some accounts; in April of that year the Hainan Normal School for Nationalities was merged into it. The institution's ethnic roots are therefore not decorative: it began as the normal school system for the Li and Miao peoples of Hainan's mountains, and ethnic studies remain one of its declared special directions today.

From the mountains to the sea: Wuzhishan to Sanya

The defining turn in the university's history is geographical. In 2008 the school opened its Sanya campus — institutional accounts describe the move as a span, or leap, from the mountains to the sea — and the main campus was established in Sanya, the tropical coastal city at the southern end of Hainan island. It passed the Ministry of Education's undergraduate teaching qualification assessment in 2013. In September 2015, with the Ministry's approval, it was renamed Hainan Tropical Ocean University, a change its sources describe as filling the gap of a large ocean province that had no ocean university; one English source notes that, despite the English name, the institution's Chinese status is that of an academy-level undergraduate institution, haiyang xueyuan. In 2016 it was approved as an application-oriented undergraduate pilot university in Hainan Province. In December 2018 the Hainan Academy of Marine and Fisheries Sciences was transferred to the university as a whole, injecting, in its own phrase, strong new impetus for its development towards the sea. In 2021 it inaugurated its Yazhou Bay Innovation Research Institute, integrating the university into Hainan Free Trade Port construction alongside the national universities gathered in Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City.

The only tropical ocean university

Institutional sources describe Hainan Tropical Ocean University as a full-time public undergraduate university jointly operated by the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Hainan Provincial People's Government, the China National Offshore Oil Corporation and the Sanya Municipal People's Government, with the Sansha Municipal People's Government also listed among its co-funders in some accounts. It is a master's degree-granting institution, a doctoral-degree construction unit for Hainan Province, and it is described as the public university standing at the southernmost part of the country and the only tropical marine university in China. It hosts a China-ASEAN Education and Training Centre and serves as an education aid base of the Ministry of Education and a training base for the inheritance of China's intangible cultural heritage, with support from China Ocean University. The university has two campuses, in Sanya and in Wuzhishan, with a total area given in recent accounts at about 2,188 mu, together with a sea area of about 1,600 mu. For its journal, that sponsorship structure is significant: a periodical published by a university co-built with the national ocean administration and an offshore oil corporation sits close to the institutions that actually govern, explore and fish the South China Sea.

Disciplines: marine, tourism, ethnicity and ecology

Recent institutional accounts describe nineteen schools offering fifty-five undergraduate programmes, two Sino-foreign cooperative programmes and nine junior-college programmes, together with a growing set of postgraduate programmes, across nine fields: liberal arts, sciences, engineering, management, law, history, agriculture, education and philosophy. Eighteen of its majors are marine-related, and the university has identified five special directions — marine science and technology, tropical marine life, tropical marine ecology and environment, island tourism, and ethnicity — which have formed a disciplinary system characterised, in its own summary, by marine, tourism, ethnicity and ecology. That combination is unavailable to any other Chinese university in the same form: Hainan is China's only tropical island province, Sanya is its principal tropical coastal tourism city, and the Li and Miao heritage that founded the university remains a living research subject in its Wuzhishan home. The journal's scope, as recorded in its directory entry — marine, tourism, ethnic Li and Miao culture and tropical ecology programmes for the South China Sea island province — maps directly onto those five directions.

Scope of the journal and the route-book example

The genglubu article of 2017 shows the journal's characteristic method at work. The route books were the handwritten navigation guides of Hainan fishermen, recording routes, islands and reefs of the South China Sea in a system of watches, or geng; Li Caixia's article in the journal traced how those books evolved from navigation into fishery use and proposed a classification and periodisation of the South China Sea texts. Research of that kind — local, documentary and maritime — could only be produced where fishermen's manuscripts, island culture and ocean scholarship meet, and South China Sea scholarship has made the journal's contribution citable far beyond Hainan: the route-book literature surveyed in European scholarship cites the journal's 2017 study alongside the Hainan University journal's related work, making the distinction between the two Sanya-and-Haikou titles a practical one for researchers. Alongside such maritime humanities, a comprehensive xuebao of this university carries the natural science of tropical seas — marine life, ecology and environment, fisheries informed by the integrated Academy of Marine and Fisheries Sciences — the management and culture of island tourism, and the ethnology of the Li and Miao peoples.

Serving the Hainan Free Trade Port and the South China Sea

The university's recent development is tied to national policy for Hainan. Institutional accounts describe the opportunities opened by the construction of the Hainan Free Trade Port from 2018, the university's marine surveying and mapping work, and a marine ranch teaching and research demonstration base at Yazhou Bay, Sanya, alongside the 2021 innovation institute that coordinates its work with the top domestic universities settled in Yazhou Bay Science and Technology City. Relying on Sanya's position as an international tropical coastal tourism city, the university has also raised its level of international education, consistent with its China-ASEAN training role and its membership of the South and Southeast Asian University Network, which it joined in 2023. A university journal in this environment functions as part of the province's knowledge infrastructure: it documents the marine science, tourism research, ethnic culture and island ecology on which the free trade port's claim to a distinctive, sustainable development model partly rests, and it gives the university's ASEAN-facing and fisheries work a permanent published form.

Distinguishing this journal from other Hainan titles

Hainan's small university system makes its titles easy to confuse, and the distinctions matter for citation. Hainan University, in the provincial capital Haikou, is the province's comprehensive flagship university; its journals — including the Journal of Tropical Biology, a bilingual Chinese-English title that began as the journal of the former South China University of Tropical Agriculture — belong to that institution, not to this one. Hainan Normal University, also in Haikou, is the province's teacher-training university and has its own journal tradition. Hainan Tropical Ocean University is a third institution entirely: founded in the Li and Miao autonomous prefecture's normal schools of 1954 and 1958, raised as Qiongzhou University in 2006, moved from Wuzhishan to Sanya from 2008, and renamed in 2015. Its journal, Hainan Redai Haiyang Xueyuan Xuebao, carries the tropical-ocean name adopted in 2015, and scholarship under the earlier Qiongzhou titles belongs to the same institutional lineage.

Reading and citing the journal

Readers meeting this title in international bibliographies will find it cited by its Chinese name in pinyin, Hainan Redai Haiyang Xueyuan Xuebao, as in the citation of the 2017 route-book article at volume 1, pages 1 to 9, in European scholarship on South China Sea route books. The English rendering of the host's name requires a caution: although the institution is called Hainan Tropical Ocean University in English, its Chinese name designates an academy, and some English sources accordingly render it Hainan Tropical Ocean College; both renderings in a reference list can denote the same university and the same journal. No ISSN is claimed in this profile, because none was attested in the sources consulted for its underlying record. The journal is a Chinese-language publication whose value to outside readers lies in its territory — tropical seas, island tourism and Li and Miao culture are subjects on which its authors write from home ground that no mainland university shares.

Why the journal matters

The Journal of Hainan Tropical Ocean University matters because it is the scholarly record of China's only tropical ocean university — an institution that began in 1954 as a normal school for the Li and Miao peoples of Hainan's mountains, crossed the island to the sea at Sanya, absorbed the province's marine and fisheries academy in 2018, and now publishes from the southernmost university city in the country, facing the South China Sea. Its pages join fishermen's route books to marine ecology, island tourism to ethnic culture, in the service of an island province building a free trade port. For readers of this directory, the Hainan Redai Haiyang Xueyuan Xuebao is the essential published window on that singular combination of mountain heritage and tropical sea.