About China Nonprofit Review

China Nonprofit Review

Overview and identity

China Nonprofit Review is a peer-reviewed, biannual, international and interdisciplinary journal for nonprofit sector research, published in Beijing, China. It is identified by print ISSN 1876-5092 and online ISSN 1876-5149. The journal is rooted in Tsinghua University's NGO Research Center in Beijing, its editorial address is recorded as B605D, Xue Yan Building, Beijing 100084, and it is published with Brill and Tsinghua University Press. Volume 1 appeared in 2009 and volume 10 in 2018. The journal covers nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, voluntarism, civil society and social governance.

It is the English-language scholarly journal of China's nonprofit studies community — a field that barely existed in China before the 1990s and that grew, with this journal's host centre, into a recognised research discipline with its own law, its own policy debates and its own literature.

Roots: Tsinghua's NGO Research Center

The journal's institutional root is the NGO Research Center of Tsinghua University, in the university's School of Public Policy and Management. The centre began teaching and researching NGOs early in the field's Chinese history; a research team at the centre had been applying itself to a large-scale investigation of China's NGOs since 1999, and its director Wang Ming became the field's best-known Chinese scholar. The centre planned and produced sets of theoretical essays on NGOs — translated Western works alongside domestic research — to meet its teaching and research needs, and the journal grew from that scholarly infrastructure.

The editorial address preserved in international records — B605D, Xue Yan Building, Beijing 100084, in Tsinghua's campus postal district — fixes the journal inside that centre. Publication arrangements pair Tsinghua University Press, named as publisher in journal directories, with Brill, the Leiden-based academic publisher whose platform carried the journal's volumes (its 2018 volume 10 announcement ran through Brill's channels), giving a Beijing-edited journal a European distribution house.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal is interdisciplinary by design: nonprofit studies sits across law, public administration, sociology, political science and management, and the journal publishes across all of them where the subject is the nonprofit sector. Its coverage, as described in its candidate record and confirmed by its contents, spans nonprofit organizations, philanthropy, voluntarism, civil society and social governance.

Its tenth volume's first issue (2018) shows the range concretely: a study of social think tanks in China — their dilemma, trends and breakthroughs — opens an issue that also carries work on the history and paradigm shift of NGOs in international development aid. Earlier volumes carried, among much else, Kaipin Kui's analysis of the two-sided effects of Japan's NPO Law on the growth of civil society (volume 1, 2009) — comparative nonprofit law from the journal's first year — and the salon series on the creation of a basic law for social organizations, a multi-part legislative deliberation published across its pages.

The salon series: a journal as legislative forum

The “Salon Series on the Creation of Legislation on the Right of Association and Social Organizations” deserves particular record. These were salons jointly hosted by Tsinghua University's NGO Research Center, the Philanthropy and NGO Support Center, and the editorial office of the China Nonprofit Review, and the journal published their papers — including Liu Peifeng and colleagues' “The Thinking behind the Creation of a Basic Law for Social Organizations” (volume 6, 2014) — as a deliberative series on whether and how China should legislate for its social organizations.

A journal that convenes and publishes legislative deliberation is doing more than reporting a field; it is hosting the field's policy formation. The series is the clearest documented instance of the journal's working method — scholarship, practice and law-making in one room, with the journal as the room's record — and it distinguishes China Nonprofit Review from journals that merely observe their sectors from outside.

History and publication pattern

Volume 1 appeared in 2009, and the journal has been published biannually — two issues a year — since, reaching volume 10 in 2018 and volume 11 in 2019, the latter carrying, for example, an analysis of regulating public fundraising in China under the Charity Law and its predecessor (volume 11, issue 1, 2019) and a study of celebrity-fronted philanthropy in the People's Republic. International directory records give its coverage as 2009 onward, frequency two issues per year, publisher Tsinghua University Press, address B605D Xue Yan Building, Beijing 100084.

One scholarly review of the field dates its use of the journal “from its inception in 2007 to 2015” — most plausibly reflecting a Chinese-language precursor phase before the English journal's 2009 volume 1 — and this profile records the discrepancy rather than resolving it silently: the English journal's own volume sequence begins in 2009, and a systematic review of Chinese nonprofit research treated the journal as a distinct corpus worth searching in its own right, alongside the CSSCI journals, for 1,222 nonprofit research articles on nonprofit–government relations.

The field the journal documents

The journal's subject has a datable modern history that its pages chronicle: a 1989 law made nonprofit organisations legal for the first time after Mao, but only if registered with the government — national organisations with the Ministry of Civil Affairs, local ones with local bureaus. From that restrictive starting point the sector grew through the 1990s and 2000s into a large, varied landscape of foundations, social associations, private non-enterprise units, grassroots organisations and, increasingly, corporate and celebrity philanthropy, regulated eventually by the Charity Law whose fundraising provisions the journal analysed in 2019.

Scholarship on the sector faces a structural difficulty the review literature names plainly: Chinese nonprofit research is scattered across numerous journals of different disciplinary focuses and multiple disciplines. China Nonprofit Review exists as the corrective — the field's own journal, in English, where that scattered conversation is gathered, and its use as a named corpus in systematic reviews confirms that the corrective works.

Article character and contributors

The journal publishes research articles that move between Chinese empirical material and international comparison: Japanese NPO law in its first volume; international development-aid paradigms in its tenth; Chinese fundraising regulation and celebrity philanthropy in its eleventh. Its authors include the Tsinghua centre's own scholars and the wider Chinese nonprofit research community, together with international contributors — a review of English-language research on China's nonprofit sector since 1976, by authors affiliated with Boston College, Tsinghua's Institute for Philanthropy and partner institutions, appeared in its pages.

That mixture — the field's Chinese founders, its younger scholars and its international students publishing in one venue — is the journal's design: an interdisciplinary, international review in which the Chinese nonprofit sector is studied by its own research community and its foreign observers together.

Indexing and discovery

The journal is recorded in international journal directories under ISSN 1876-5092 (print) and 1876-5149 (online), with Brill's platform providing its digital archive (DOIs under the 10.1163 prefix, Brill's house prefix) and Tsinghua University Press named as publisher of record. A SciOpen journal page also carries the title in current listings. Its articles are cited across the nonprofit-studies literature, and bibliographies of research on charities and NGOs in China draw on it heavily — one topic bibliography lists dozens of its articles among the top sources.

Readership and use

Readers are nonprofit-studies scholars, public-administration and law researchers, philanthropy professionals and the policy community concerned with social organisations in China. For international readers it is the single most direct English-language route into Chinese nonprofit scholarship: the sector's law, its government relations, its philanthropic turn, documented by the research centre that helped create the field. Cite it by exact title with ISSN 1876-5092; note the journal is also styled The China Nonprofit Review in some of its own announcements, the same title with its article.

Continuing role

China's nonprofit sector continues to professionalise under the Charity Law era's regulatory settlement, and the research field around it continues to consolidate. Rooted in Tsinghua University's NGO Research Center, edited from Xue Yan Building in Beijing, published with Brill and Tsinghua University Press under ISSN 1876-5092, and in publication since volume 1 in 2009, China Nonprofit Review remains the English-language journal of record for the study of nonprofits, philanthropy and civil society in China.