About Journal of Baicheng Normal University

Journal of Baicheng Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Baicheng Normal University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Baicheng Normal University in Baicheng, in the far west of Jilin Province, Northeast China. Its Chinese title is Baicheng Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao, following the standard pattern of the Chinese university journal, or xuebao, in which a university sponsors and edits a scholarly periodical under its own name. No International Standard Serial Number was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here. The journal's identity is defined by the singularity of its host: Baicheng Normal University is the only provincial undergraduate university in western Jilin, which makes its journal the only university journal edited in the entire Baicheng prefecture. From that position it records the scholarship of a distinctive borderland region where Jilin meets Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia, on the southwestern edge of the Songnen Plain, near the great crane wetlands of the Nen River.

Baicheng and the western Jilin borderland

Baicheng lies at the intersection of three provincial-level regions: Jilin to its east, Heilongjiang to its north and the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to its west. University and provincial sources alike emphasise this three-way junction as the defining fact of the institution's location. The prefecture occupies the southwestern part of the Songnen Plain, the broad agricultural lowland of the Northeast, drained here by the Nen River and its tributaries. To the west the plain rises toward the Greater Khingan foothills; within the prefecture are the Xianghai and Momoge wetlands, protected areas famous across China as breeding and staging grounds for red-crowned cranes and other migratory birds of the East Asian flyway. Western Jilin is farming and grassland country, drier than the rest of the province, where questions of water, soil, grassland culture and ecological protection carry a weight they do not have further east. A university journal published in Baicheng therefore has a natural regional brief: the ecology, agriculture, history and education of China's northeastern grassland frontier.

Origins and development: 1958 to the undergraduate upgrade

Baicheng Normal University was founded in 1958, its predecessor being the Baicheng Teachers College established that year to train teachers for the schools of the western prefecture. For its first four decades the institution worked at the level of a specialised normal college, supplying the primary and secondary schools of a largely rural region. A significant enlargement came in August 2000, when the Baicheng Forestry School, formerly affiliated to the State Forestry Administration, was merged into the college, adding a forestry and land-management tradition that fitted naturally with the grassland and wetland environment of the prefecture. In March 2002 the institution was upgraded to an undergraduate college and took the name Baicheng Teachers College in its new form, rendered in English as Baicheng Normal University. The upgraded college moved quickly to consolidate its standing: from 2007 it began jointly training master's students together with Northeast Normal University, the region's leading normal university in Changchun, and in 2008 it passed the Ministry of Education's undergraduate teaching-level evaluation with excellent results, followed by a further review evaluation in 2017.

The university today

Provincial government sources describe Baicheng Normal University as a campus of some 725,800 square metres offering 50 undergraduate majors across nine disciplines: law, education, literature, history, science, engineering, agriculture, management and the arts. The presence of agriculture among those disciplines marks the university out among normal colleges and reflects the farming economy of the Songnen Plain around it. The university reports two national characteristic majors, four provincial characteristic high-level majors and six provincial first-class majors, together with national and provincial off-campus practice bases for its students. Since its establishment in 1958, the university states, it has trained more than 70,000 qualified teachers for basic education and applied professionals for the region's economic and social development. It has also carried out friendly cooperation with more than 30 universities abroad, including teacher and student exchanges and international Chinese-language education. For the journal, these figures define a scholarly community: a mid-sized undergraduate institution whose faculty publish across the full range of a comprehensive college's work.

Research platforms and the western Jilin brief

Baicheng Normal University has organised its research around the needs and character of western Jilin. College sources list 13 provincial-level scientific research platforms, whose recorded names show the pattern clearly: platforms devoted to teacher education research, to entrepreneurship education and cultural research, to grassland culture research, to humanities, social sciences and basic theory, and to the economic and social development of western Jilin and its applications. Grassland culture is a subject that belongs to Baicheng in a way it cannot belong to the forest and mountain universities of eastern Jilin: the prefecture's history is bound up with Mongolian and Han settlement of the plain, with horse and herding traditions at the edge of the steppe, and with the meeting of farming and pastoral cultures. The university's recent research output, as reported in its own summaries, runs to well over a thousand academic papers in a three-year period, including papers indexed in international and Chinese citation systems, alongside provincial and national research projects and awards. The journal is the home venue in which much of this locally oriented research first appears.

What the journal publishes

As the comprehensive journal of the prefecture's only undergraduate university, the Journal of Baicheng Normal University publishes across the disciplines its host teaches: education, literature, history, law, the sciences, engineering, agriculture, management and the arts. Education research is a standing strand, as it is in every normal university's xuebao, serving the teachers and schools of western Jilin for whom the university is the regional centre of professional knowledge. The regional strands are what give the journal its particular flavour. Ecological research connected with the Nen River wetlands, including the Xianghai and Momoge reserves and their crane populations, agricultural research for the dry western plain, and studies of grassland culture and of the economic and social development of western Jilin all draw on the university's named research platforms. Because there is no second university in the prefecture, the journal also carries a general civic-scholarly function: it is where the history, environment and society of Baicheng are studied in print, in a form that libraries and researchers elsewhere can cite.

Serving a three-province junction

The university's location at the junction of Jilin, Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia means its service area is not confined to its own province. Students and scholarly questions arrive from across the border region, and the journal's regional research speaks to a readership on all three sides of the junction: the black-soil farming counties of western Heilongjiang, the Mongolian-banner country of eastern Inner Mongolia and the Baicheng prefecture itself share questions of grassland ecology, borderland history and rural education. The joint training of master's students with Northeast Normal University since 2007 also ties the journal's community into the wider scholarly network of the Northeast, while the university's cooperation with more than 30 overseas universities gives its faculty, and by extension its journal, an international dimension unusual for so remote a prefecture institution. Remoteness, in this case, is precisely the journal's value: scholarly publishing in China is concentrated in the great cities, and a xuebao edited on the Nen River plain documents a part of the country that metropolitan journals seldom reach.

The xuebao tradition and the journal's place in it

The Journal of Baicheng Normal University belongs to China's large family of university journals, periodicals edited within a university, published in Chinese, and serving as the institution's scholarly record and its faculty's home venue. Within that family, the journals of sole-prefecture universities hold a special position. Where a city has many universities, as Changchun or Shenyang do, scholarly publishing is divided among many titles; where a prefecture has exactly one undergraduate institution, its xuebao carries the whole of the region's formal research output. Baicheng's journal is such a title. Its lineage follows the institution's own: a normal college founded in 1958, enlarged by the forestry-school merger of 2000, and raised to undergraduate status in 2002. Each of those steps widened the journal's remit, from teacher training alone to the comprehensive, agriculture- and ecology-aware profile the university presents today. The journal's continuity across those changes is the continuity of western Jilin's only university itself.

Reading the journal today

For a first-time reader, the Journal of Baicheng Normal University is best approached as the research record of China's northeastern grassland frontier. Its pages show what scholars based in Baicheng study: the wetlands and cranes of the Nen River, the grassland culture of the Mongolian-Han borderland, the farming problems of the dry Songnen Plain, and the schooling of a rural three-province junction. The journal is published in Chinese, and its primary audience is the Chinese scholarly community, particularly the education and regional-studies researchers of the Northeast. No ISSN is claimed in this profile because none was attested in the sources consulted. What can be said with confidence is the structural fact that gives the journal its importance: it is the only university journal of western Jilin, published by the institution that has trained the region's teachers since 1958 and that alone represents higher education across the Baicheng prefecture.