About Global Review

Global Review

Global Review is a Chinese-language bimonthly journal of international studies published in Shanghai by the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (SIIS), the municipal government's foreign-policy think tank. Its Chinese title is 国际展望 (Guoji Zhanwang). SIIS itself names Global Review, in Chinese and bimonthly, as one of its two academic journals — the other being its English-language China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies — and describes the pair as the institutes' flagship journals and a prestigious academic platform for domestic and international scholarship. The journal publishes analysis of global politics, major-power relations, regional affairs and China's external environment.

Shanghai's perspective is the journal's distinction. China's international studies are centred in Beijing's ministries and academies; Global Review is the senior journal of the country's other great foreign-policy research establishment, the one maintained by the Shanghai municipal government in China's largest commercial city.

The publishing institutes

The Shanghai Institutes for International Studies was established in 1960 as a comprehensive research institution — one of the earliest government-affiliated think tanks in China dedicated to international studies. Its inaugural president was Jin Zhonghua, then a vice mayor of Shanghai. SIIS describes itself as a government-affiliated, high-calibre think tank dedicated to informing government decision-making through policy-oriented studies in world politics, economics, foreign policy and international security, and it has been ranked among China's most influential international studies and foreign policy think tanks.

The institutes' structure, as SIIS currently presents it, comprises six institutes — for global governance studies, foreign policy studies, world economic studies, international strategic and security studies, public policy and innovation, and Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao studies — and eight area-studies centres covering American studies, Russian and Central Asian studies, West Asian and African studies, European studies, maritime and polar studies, Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia and South Asia. Global Review is the Chinese-language journal through which that entire research establishment publishes.

One of two flagship journals

SIIS states that it publishes two academic journals: Global Review (Chinese, bimonthly) and China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies (English), together with occasional papers in both languages. Its annual reports repeat the pairing: the two are "the two flagship journals of SIIS" and "have become a prestigious academic platform for domestic and international scholarship".

The division between them is linguistic and strategic. The English quarterly presents SIIS scholarship — strategic issues related to China's role in global affairs, China's international strategy and foreign policy, world economy, global governance, international security, regional politics and the transformation of the international system — to an international readership through an international publisher. Global Review does the corresponding work in Chinese for the domestic scholarly and policy community: it is where SIIS's analysis enters the Chinese-language literature, to be cited by the universities, academies and institutes that make up China's IR profession.

Scope and contents

The journal publishes analysis of global politics, major-power relations, regional affairs and China's external environment. That scope mirrors its publisher's research mission: SIIS studies the United States, Japan, Europe, Russia and the Asia-Pacific region especially, focusing on relations among major powers and on China's periphery, and pursues medium- and long-term comprehensive research on significant issues in contemporary international politics, economy and security.

Its contents therefore range across the institutes' full map: American politics and China–United States relations from its Center for American Studies; European and Russian questions from the corresponding centres; West Asian, African, South and Southeast Asian affairs; maritime and polar issues; Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao; and the cross-cutting questions of global governance and world economy handled by its thematic institutes. The "Roundtable of Global Review" recorded in SIIS's annual reporting shows the journal also functioning as a convening brand — a forum name under which the institutes gather scholars to address a theme, then publish the results.

Shanghai's window on the world

SIIS was founded to serve both the nation and its city: its mission statements commit it to China's modernisation and to Shanghai's opening-up and economic development. That dual loyalty gives Global Review a character distinct from Beijing institute journals. Shanghai is China's principal port, financial centre and point of contact with the world economy; a journal published there by the municipal think tank naturally attends to the external environment as it bears on an open, trading city as well as on the state.

The institutes maintain academic exchanges and cooperative relations with around a hundred universities and research institutions in some thirty countries and regions, sponsor workshops and international conferences, and host foreign scholars — activity that feeds the journal with visiting perspectives and sends its contents outward through the same networks. SIIS has admitted postgraduates in international politics since 1979, and its journal serves that teaching function too, as a venue its own researchers and students read and cite.

Publishing pattern and identification

Global Review is published bimonthly in Chinese from Shanghai — six issues a year — by the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, whose address is 195-15 Tianlin Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai. Earlier English-language descriptions of SIIS list its historical periodicals under titles including Survey of International Affairs, International Review and World Outlook — the lineage of Shanghai institute publishing from which the present flagship titles emerged — while the institutes' current, authoritative self-description names Global Review and the China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies as its two journals.

Bibliographic identification rests on the Chinese title 国际展望, the publisher SIIS, the Shanghai base and the bimonthly frequency. The English name Global Review is shared with unrelated publications abroad; the Shanghai journal is the one attached to SIIS, and citations should be checked against that publisher.

Readership

The journal's readers are China's international-studies community: scholars and graduate students in international relations, researchers at other think tanks and academies, and officials who follow analytical work on the country's external environment. As a flagship of a major think tank, it is also read abroad — in translation, in citation, and through the institutes' exchange partners — by those who track how Chinese analysts outside the capital's ministry system assess the world.

Its authorship reflects its publisher: SIIS fellows form the core — the institutes have around eighty full-time staff including some thirty senior fellows by their own account — joined by contributors from the wider Chinese and, through exchanges, international scholarly community.

The journal as the institutes' public record

Because SIIS is a policy-oriented think tank whose primary products are research reports for government, its journals carry a particular evidentiary weight. Global Review is the part of the institutes' output that is published openly, on a regular bimonthly schedule, with named authors from its institutes and centres. Its issues therefore form a dated public record of the questions Shanghai's foreign-policy establishment was addressing at each point — global governance, major-power relations, the regions of its eight area centres, and China's external environment — in the form its researchers were willing to argue in print before the national scholarly community.

That record is complemented by the institutes' other public outputs — the English quarterly, occasional papers in Chinese and English, and an annual report series that documents its conferences, exchanges and journal activity year by year. Within that system, Global Review is the Chinese-language scholarly layer: slower than a report, more durable than a conference, and citable in the literature in a way internal research products are not.

Place among China's IR journals

China's institute journals of international studies are dominated by Beijing: the foreign ministry's institute, the state security institute, the academy institutes. Global Review is the leading exception — a flagship journal from a municipal think tank that has sustained, since 1960, a research establishment of national standing. Its existence demonstrates that Chinese strategic analysis is not a monopoly of the capital.

Within Shanghai, the journal anchors the institutes' public identity alongside its English sister title. Within the national field, it carries the Shanghai school of international studies — empirically minded, regionally comprehensive, and oriented to the needs of an open economy — into the bimonthly literature of Chinese foreign-policy research. For readers who want to know how China studies the world from its greatest port city, Global Review is the journal where that work appears.