About Studies on Core Socialist Values

Studies on Core Socialist Values

Studies on Core Socialist Values is a Chinese-language academic journal published in Beijing by Tsinghua University Press and presented on the publisher's Tsinghua Journals platform. Its Chinese title is 社会主义核心价值观研究, in pinyin Shehui Zhuyi Hexin Jiazhiguan Yanjiu, which translates literally as research on the socialist core values. The journal is bimonthly, publishing six issues a year, and its ISSN is 2096-1189, as recorded in the Tsinghua University Press journal list. Its volume sequence indicates a 2015 founding: volume 6 appeared in 2020 and volume 11 in 2025, a run consistent with a journal that began publishing in 2015 and has continued without interruption since.

Identity and bibliographic record

The journal's English title, Studies on Core Socialist Values, is the name under which Tsinghua Journals presents it to international readers, while the Chinese title remains the title of record for its domestic readership. It is published in Beijing, the home city of Tsinghua University and its press, and it is distributed through the Tsinghua Journals website, where readers can browse its archive by volume and issue. The archive visible on that platform runs from its early volumes through volume 11 in 2025, with six numbers a year in recent volumes, for example issues 1 to 5 of volume 11 listed during 2025 and issue 6 of volume 10 closing the 2024 volume. The ISSN 2096-1189 identifies the title in the publisher's journal list, and readers should rely on that publisher attestation for the number, since journal platform pages for Tsinghua titles have at times displayed template information belonging to other journals.

Founding in 2015

The journal's founding in 2015 placed it in a specific moment in Chinese academic life. The formulation of the socialist core values had been set out at the national level in the years immediately before: the values were articulated in the framework often summarised as the three advocacies, and in December 2013 a central guidance document on cultivating and practising the socialist core values established them as a subject requiring sustained public and scholarly attention. A specialist journal devoted entirely to that subject, founded at one of China's leading universities two years later, gave researchers a dedicated venue in which the values could be studied theoretically, historically and empirically, rather than treated only as a theme inside general journals of ideology, education or political theory. Its uninterrupted volume sequence from 2015 to volume 11 in 2025 shows that the experiment found a lasting readership.

The subject: China's core socialist values

To understand the journal, readers need the structure of the values it studies. The socialist core values are expressed in twelve terms, twenty-four Chinese characters in total, arranged at three levels. At the national level the values are prosperity, democracy, civility and harmony, describing the goals of the state. At the social level they are freedom, equality, justice and the rule of law, describing the orientation of society. At the individual level they are patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendship, describing the conduct expected of citizens. Scholarship on the values typically works with this three-level structure, examining what each term means, how the terms relate to one another, and how a value formulated at the level of the state is translated into social practice and personal conduct. The journal exists to publish exactly that work.

Scope and research themes

The journal publishes theoretical and empirical research on China's core socialist values across their national, social and individual dimensions. Its pages take up the construction of civic morality, values education, and the relationship between the core socialist values and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. A single issue illustrates the range: volume 6, issue 2, published in April 2020, carried articles on cultivating morals and nurturing the young through civic morality construction in the new era, on strengthening social morality education, on the core socialist values and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, on fostering reverence for law within overall rule of law, on practising the values in the microcultural dimension of daily life, on patriotic education under the challenge of the pandemic, and on the place of the values in college ideological and political theory courses. Confucian benevolence thought and its lessons for cultivating the values also featured, showing the journal's interest in the dialogue between the values and Chinese traditional culture.

Publisher: Tsinghua University Press

Tsinghua University Press, the publishing house of Tsinghua University in Beijing, publishes the journal as part of a substantial list of Chinese-language scholarly journals presented through its Tsinghua Journals platform. That platform hosts the journal's archive, tables of contents and article pages, with English-language titles and abstracts provided for articles whose full text is in Chinese, a presentation that allows international readers to follow the journal's contents even without reading Chinese. Tsinghua University is also home to a School of Marxism and to research platforms concerned with the socialist core values, including a collaborative innovation centre on socialist key values noted in the university's own descriptions of the school, so the journal sits within an institution where its subject is an established research priority rather than a marginal interest.

Place in the field of values research

Research on the socialist core values is a large field in Chinese academia, carried on in universities' schools of Marxism, in moral education research centres and in journals of ideological and political education. Bibliometric studies of the field, drawing on thousands of articles in core journals, have organised it into themes of basic theory, systematic cultivation and practice, and dissemination and identity. Within that crowded landscape, Studies on Core Socialist Values holds a distinctive position as a journal whose entire remit is the values themselves. It has also been recognised in evaluations of Marxist theory journals: lists of high-reprint journals in the discipline, compiled from the reprint record of Chinese academic digests, include 社会主义核心价值观研究 among the titles whose articles are most frequently reprinted, an indication that its contents are read and reused by scholars across the field.

Readership and authors

The journal's natural readership is the community that teaches and researches the values: faculty in schools of Marxism, teachers of ideological and political theory courses in colleges and universities, moral education researchers, and graduate students in Marxist theory and related disciplines. Its 2020 issue contents show authors writing from within that community on questions its members face directly, from how patriotic education should respond to a public health emergency to how the values should be woven into the theory courses every Chinese undergraduate takes. Because the journal publishes in Chinese, its primary influence is domestic, but its English-titled presence on the Tsinghua Journals platform, with translated titles and abstracts, makes its research agenda visible to international scholars of Chinese ideology and values education.

Publication pattern and continuity

The journal is bimonthly, with six issues a year making up each annual volume. Volume 6 in 2020 and volume 11 in 2025 anchor its chronology, and the platform record for 2025 shows the year's issues appearing in sequence, volume 11, numbers 1 through 5 listed in the course of the year. A decade of continuous bimonthly publication, from a specialist title founded in 2015, is itself a fact of some significance: it demonstrates a sustained flow of submissions and readers sufficient to support six issues a year on a single, tightly defined subject. No change of title, publisher or frequency is recorded in the sources consulted for this profile, and the journal's identity has remained stable since its founding.

Significance

Studies on Core Socialist Values matters because it is the specialist journal of record for one of the central value concepts of contemporary China. The twelve core socialist values are displayed on public buildings, taught in schools and universities, and invoked across Chinese public life; the scholarly work of defining them, tracing their sources in Marxism and Chinese tradition, and studying how they are taught and practised is concentrated in journals such as this one. Published by Tsinghua University Press in Beijing, appearing six times a year since 2015 and recognised in disciplinary reprint evaluations, it offers researchers, in China and abroad, the clearest single window onto how Chinese academia itself studies the values its society professes.