About China Perspectives

China Perspectives

China Perspectives is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed academic journal published quarterly in Hong Kong by the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, the CEFC. Launched in English in 1995 as the English edition of the French journal Perspectives chinoises, created in 1992, it focuses on the political, social, economic and cultural evolution of contemporary mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and of overseas Chinese communities and actors. All submissions are blindly reviewed by two anonymous external referees. The journal has been indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index since 2019, and it is available through international databases and platforms including JSTOR, ProQuest, EBSCO and OpenEdition.

The journal is unusual among China studies periodicals in its institutional origin. It is not the journal of a university or a commercial publisher, but the publication of a French public research centre based in Hong Kong — part of a network of French research centres abroad — written and edited by social scientists and addressed to an international scholarly readership. Its history therefore runs in two languages, and its recent history includes a decisive change: after three decades in which French and English editions appeared in parallel, the French edition and print publication ended in 2022, and from 2023 China Perspectives has continued in English only.

The publisher: the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China

The French Centre for Research on Contemporary China — in French, the Centre d'études français sur la Chine contemporaine, or CEFC — was founded in Hong Kong in 1991. It is a Hong Kong-based research institute that is part of a network of 27 public research centres under the aegis of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the CNRS. The centre houses a library of classic social-science works on China, Hong Kong and Macau in French, English and Chinese, and China Perspectives is its quarterly research journal dedicated to contemporary China.

The centre expanded beyond Hong Kong. In 1994 Jean-Pierre Cabestan opened a branch in Taipei, Taiwan, which has been hosted by Academia Sinica since 1998. In July 2011 a Franco-Chinese research centre was founded in Beijing, and it became affiliated with the CEFC in March 2014 and is hosted by Tsinghua University. Since 2020 the CEFC itself has been located at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where the journal's editorial correspondence is addressed. The journal is thus edited close to its field — from Hong Kong, with centre branches in Taipei and Beijing — by an institution whose researchers work on the contemporary Chinese world it covers.

Predecessors: the French sinology bulletins in Hong Kong

China Perspectives did not begin French publishing on China in Hong Kong. Its predecessor was the Bulletin Mensuel, published by the Hong Kong branch of the French Centre for Research on Sinology between 1979 and 1983, followed by the Bulletin de sinologie, the Sinology Bulletin, from 1983 to 1992. Those bulletins were the earlier form in which French sinological work in Hong Kong reported on Chinese developments to its readers.

The journal's 30th-anniversary editorial recounts the transition directly: in the Sinology Bulletin published in January 1992, Michel Bonnin and Raphaël Jacquet announced, without sadness, the ending of the bulletin, which gave place to the birth of Perspectives chinoises, described as a journal which would increase its influence. The new journal appeared in the year of Deng Xiaoping's famous Southern Tour in January and February 1992, which relaunched the programme of reform and opening up — the moment from which the contemporary China that the CEFC had just been founded to study took a new turn.

Perspectives chinoises: the French journal of 1992

Perspectives chinoises was created and first published in 1992 by Michel Bonnin, Jean-Philippe Béja and Raphaël Jacquet, and was launched by the newly founded CEFC. Bonnin was its editor-in-chief from 1992 to 1998, and he also directed the CEFC itself from 1991 to 1998, before Jean-Pierre Cabestan directed the centre from 1998 to 2003. The anniversary editorial calls Bonnin the founding father of the journal.

In its first years the French journal was, in the anniversary editorial's word, homemade: most of its articles were written by CEFC researchers themselves. From 1992 to 1998, among all the texts published in Perspectives chinoises and China Perspectives in every category — editorial, article, book review, translation and the rest — about 50 were written by Michel Bonnin, more or less the same number by Jean-Philippe Béja, and more than 20 by Raphaël Jacquet. That concentration reflects a small research centre publishing its own work for a French-reading audience interested in a China that was changing rapidly after 1992.

China Perspectives: the English edition from 1995

China Perspectives was launched in 1995 as the English version of the French-language journal created in 1992. Its first editor-in-chief, from 1995 to 1999, was Raphaël Jacquet, one of the three creators of the French edition, who later moved on to become The China Quarterly's editorial manager. The two versions were then published jointly for more than two and a half decades, making the same body of contemporary China research available to readers in French and in English.

The English edition is the date from which the CEFC itself dates the journal: its official description calls China Perspectives an interdisciplinary academic journal established in 1995. In practice the twin publication meant that French research on contemporary China — a tradition with its own institutions, questions and style — entered the English-language conversation in China studies systematically, issue by issue, rather than only through occasional translations of individual books or articles.

Scope: the contemporary Chinese world

The CEFC defines the journal's focus as the political, social, economic and cultural evolutions of contemporary mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, as well as overseas Chinese communities and actors. As a multidisciplinary journal, it aims to make recent and original research accessible beyond disciplinary boundaries, using a variety of approaches across politics, economics and social and cultural developments in contemporary China. Published in Hong Kong, the journal is close to the field and endeavours to publish ground-breaking work by scholars.

The centre also stresses the balance the quarterly schedule is meant to strike: a quarterly publication remains reactive to current events while maintaining the distance necessary to academic research. Its special features illustrate the range within that remit. Recent issues listed by the CEFC have been devoted to subjects including Hong Kong in the 2020s, China's borderlands, Taiwanese cinephilia, movement and mobility in Hong Kong during the 1950s to 1970s, Taiwan at the centre of twenty-first-century global geopolitics, and rethinking Southwest China — a spread across politics, society, culture and history that matches the journal's stated scope.

Structure of an issue and peer review

Each issue of China Perspectives is structured in three sections. The first is a Special Feature, coordinated by an expert on the topic and approached through a collection of peer-reviewed research articles. The second consists of peer-reviewed research articles devoted to all aspects of contemporary China, outside the special feature's theme. The third is book reviews of recent publications, together with longer review essays of important works tracking the latest developments in the field of research.

The journal is endowed with an editorial board of internationally recognised experts in all areas of the social sciences, and all submissions are blindly reviewed by two anonymous external referees — the double-blind process described in its official description. The CEFC's current listing names Florence Padovani as director of publication and Camille Salgues as chief editor, with an editorial team drawn from CEFC researchers and a large international editorial board whose members are based at institutions in Paris, Hong Kong, Taipei, London, Amsterdam, New York and elsewhere. That structure — a Hong Kong editorial office, a French research institution, and a board spread across the international China-studies community — is the practical form of the journal's position between French, Hong Kong and global scholarship.

Indexing and international availability

China Perspectives has been indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, part of the Web of Science, since 2019, and in the European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences, ERIH PLUS, since 2015. It is ranked by the French Council for the Evaluation of Research, HCERES, in political science, sociology and demography, and anthropology. The CEFC also records an A ranking in social sciences in a Spanish integrated classification of scientific journals and a 9.9 score on the ICDS metric consultable through the MIAR system of the University of Barcelona.

The journal is available in eight international databases, including EBSCO, Informit, JSTOR, ProQuest and OpenEdition. Earlier CEFC listings of its online availability also named the centre's own website and French journal platforms among its outlets, and itemised EBSCO services including Academic Search Complete and Academic Search Premier. For archiving, the CEFC states that the publisher's version in PDF may be archived after a one-year embargo following publication, with publisher copyright and source acknowledged, and that the embargo can be lifted upon the publisher's decision. Full-text availability through JSTOR and the other aggregators gives a journal published by a small Hong Kong research centre a library presence comparable to that of much larger publishers.

From two languages and print to English-only digital publication

For most of its life the journal existed in two languages at once. The French Perspectives chinoises and the English China Perspectives were published jointly until 2022. That year marked both the 30th anniversary of the French journal's founding and the end of that arrangement: 2022 saw the last issues of the French-language journal and the termination of printed issues, decisions the anniversary editorial describes as made in the midst of changes affecting the centre and the journal. Starting in 2023, only the English edition is published.

The anniversary editorial, written as the French edition closed, noted that China Perspectives itself would soon enter its fourth decade of existence in 2025, and that measures in 2023 were intended to increase the number of published articles in each issue. The journal that continues is therefore the English one founded in 1995: quarterly, peer-reviewed, Hong Kong-based and digital, carrying forward a publication lineage that began with a French sinology bulletin in 1979.

Place in contemporary China studies

China Perspectives occupies a distinctive niche among journals on contemporary China. It is one of the relatively small number of such journals published from within the region it studies — from Hong Kong, by researchers based there and in Taipei and Beijing — while being institutionally rooted in European public research and indexed, since 2019, in the main international social-science citation index. Its bilingual decades made French scholarship on contemporary China continuously available in English, and its special-feature format lets each issue organise current research around a single question before the wider field.

From the Bulletin Mensuel of 1979, through Perspectives chinoises in 1992 and the English China Perspectives in 1995, to the English-only quarterly of today, the publication has followed the transformation of its subject: the China of reform and opening that prompted the CEFC's founding in 1991, and the Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and overseas Chinese worlds connected to it. That continuity of institution, place and remit — more than forty years from the first bulletin, and thirty years from the English journal's launch — is the basis of its standing as a Hong Kong window on contemporary China.