About Ethno-National Studies

Ethno-National Studies

Ethno-National Studies is a Chinese-language journal of ethnology and ethnic studies, published in Beijing by the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and issued by China Social Sciences Press. Its Chinese title is 民族研究 (Minzu Yanjiu), and issues are documented from 1979. It is China's flagship journal for research on ethnic groups, ethnic policy, ethnology and anthropology, a CSSCI source journal, and it appears bimonthly. No other Chinese periodical occupies quite its position: it is the journal of the national institute for ethnology, in the country whose twentieth-century state-building included one of the largest ethnic classification projects ever undertaken.

The journal's English name in this directory, Ethno-National Studies, renders Minzu Yanjiu — literally "ethnic studies" or "studies of nationality" — where minzu is the central concept of Chinese ethnic affairs: the ethnic groups and the nation whose relations the field studies. Understanding the journal begins with understanding that its subject is not folklore alone, but the theory, policy and lived reality of a multi-ethnic state.

Origins: from translation collections to a flagship journal

The journal's lineage reaches back before its 1979 documented run. Scholarly histories of Chinese ethnology record that in 1954 the Counselors' Office of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission began compiling the Collection of Translations on Ethnic Issues as internal information material; in 1955 the research department of Minzu University of China took over the work; and in 1958 the publication was renamed Ethnic Studies (Minzu Yanjiu) and was edited and published by the Institute of Ethnic Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Issues of the journal under its own name are documented from 1979 — the moment when Chinese ethnology, suppressed as a discipline for many years, was being rebuilt in the reform era. The same histories describe what that rebuilding meant: ethnology had been revoked in mainland China, with no teaching and research institutions, majors or publications dedicated to it, and its rebirth was marked by the reform-and-opening turning point of 1978. Minzu Yanjiu's appearance at exactly that juncture made it the printed home of a discipline reconstituting itself.

The publishing institute

The journal is the journal of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences — formerly the Institute of Ethnic Studies — China's national research institute for the field, in Beijing. The institute's predecessor played a leading role, together with Minzu University of China, in the two great nationwide campaigns that defined Chinese ethnology's post-1949 character: the ethnic identification project, which from 1950 onward classified more than 400 self-reported groups into the 56 recognised ethnic groups of China, a process completed in 1979; and the social and historical investigations of ethnic minorities that began in 1950 and produced case reports across the minority regions.

A journal produced by that institute inherits its archives, its fieldwork traditions and its policy proximity. Its pages can draw on researchers who study ethnic areas at first hand — the institute conducted, for example, the comprehensive survey of economic and social development in China's ethnic minority areas at the beginning of the twenty-first century, launched in 2013 — and its subject matter is set by the questions the field's national institute judges important.

Scope: ethnic groups, policy, ethnology, anthropology

The journal publishes research on ethnic groups, ethnic policy, ethnology and anthropology. In practice its contents span the theory of ethnic relations and the Marxist theory of nationality that frames Chinese ethnic studies; ethnographic and historical studies of China's ethnic groups; the policies through which the Chinese state governs ethnic affairs and minority regions; and anthropological work that connects Chinese material to the international discipline.

Recent decades of its contents, as reflected in the scholarship that cites it, include programmatic work on the direction of ethnic studies in a new era — notably discussion of forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation (the consciousness of the Chinese national community) as the strategic orientation of the field — alongside ethnographic studies of particular peoples and places. The journal thus carries both the field's self-definition and its empirical research, which is what a flagship journal is for.

The discipline it serves

Chinese ethnology has a documented hundred-year history: introduced through translations at the turn of the twentieth century — Yan Fu's rendering of Huxley's Evolution and Ethics in the 1890s and a Chinese Ethnology in 1903 — institutionalised in the 1920s when Academia Sinica created an ethnology team and universities founded programmes, mobilised after 1949 into the ethnic identification and social-historical survey campaigns, abolished as a named discipline for a long period, and rebuilt after 1978. Cai Yuanpei is recognised as the founder of Chinese anthropology, whose 1926 essay "On Ethnology" defined the field as the investigation and comparison of ethnic cultures.

Ethno-National Studies is the journal of the post-1978 phase of that history. Its existence from 1979 marks the discipline's restored public presence, and its continued publication marks the field's permanence: ethnology in China is no longer a campaign science but a standing scholarly discipline with a national institute, university departments and a flagship journal.

Standing: CSSCI and the core lists

The journal is a source journal of the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) — the selective index maintained by Nanjing University's evaluation centre that designates the leading Chinese-language journals of the humanities and social sciences. For an ethnology journal, CSSCI status confirms its position at the top of its discipline's journal hierarchy: contributions to Minzu Yanjiu are the field's reference points, and its articles are the ones other scholars must engage.

That standing also shapes the journal's function. In a field where research informs policy toward 56 recognised ethnic groups and the regions they inhabit, the flagship journal's agenda-setting power is considerable. The themes it foregrounds — in recent years, national community consciousness, ethnic-area development, and the theoretical renewal of ethnic studies — become the themes the wider discipline takes up.

Publishing arrangements

The journal is published in Beijing by China Social Sciences Press, the publishing house of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, on a bimonthly schedule. Its editorial home is the academy's Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, whose name itself records the field's development: founded as an institute of ethnic studies, it now joins ethnology and anthropology in a single institute, and its journal serves both.

Its language is Chinese. Like other CASS institute journals, it is read through the Chinese academic database system, and its articles are cited in the international literature on Chinese anthropology — English-language histories and reviews of the discipline refer to Minzu Yanjiu's contents, its role in the field's revival and the programmatic statements published in its pages. Bibliographic records should be checked under the Chinese title 民族研究, the pinyin Minzu Yanjiu, and this directory's English rendering, Ethno-National Studies.

Research character: fieldwork and theory together

Two kinds of article characterise the journal. The first is ethnographic and historical: studies grounded in the fieldwork tradition that Chinese ethnology built through its survey campaigns and that its researchers continue in minority regions and, increasingly, overseas — Chinese anthropology's global turn, including overseas ethnographic research along the Belt and Road, is part of the same scholarly world the journal serves. The second is theoretical and policy-oriented: examinations of ethnic theory, of the categories through which China classifies and governs ethnic difference, and of the direction of ethnic work.

A journal that publishes both kinds holds its field together. The ethnography supplies the evidence; the theory supplies the frame; and the policy relevance that distinguishes Chinese ethnic studies from purely academic anthropology runs through both. That combination, sustained since 1979, is the journal's identity.

Place in Chinese scholarship

Within the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, institute journals are the senior venues of their disciplines, and Minzu Yanjiu is the senior venue of ethnology and ethnic studies. Within Chinese publishing more broadly, it stands alongside the other flagship titles through which the academy speaks discipline by discipline. For outside scholars, it is the first Chinese journal to consult for the state of the art in Chinese ethnic studies — and a primary source for how China's ethnological establishment understands its own subject.

Read across its decades, the journal records the transformation of its field: from the classification campaigns of the socialist period, through the discipline's abolition and revival, to a twenty-first-century ethnology concerned with national community, development and global comparison. Ethno-National Studies is therefore both a research journal and an archive — of China's ethnic groups, and of the changing science that studies them.