About Journal of Huaibei Normal University

Journal of Huaibei Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Huaibei Normal University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Huaibei Normal University in Huaibei, northern Anhui Province. Its Chinese title is Huaibei Shifan Daxue Xuebao. It is published in two editions, a Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition and a Natural Science Edition, reflecting the two broad halves of the university's teaching and research. The journal is the scholarly voice of a university that began as a coal-industry teachers college and grew into the principal comprehensive normal university of northern Anhui.

The clean record for this profile notes the journal's regional research themes, including studies of the Sui-Tang Grand Canal and of the transition of Huaibei as a coal city, alongside general scholarship across the university's disciplines. No ISSN for the journal was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is stated here.

Founded in 1974 as a branch of Anhui Normal University

Huaibei Normal University was founded in 1974 as the Huaibei branch, or Huaibei campus, of Anhui Normal University. It was created to train higher-education teachers for the northern Anhui region at a moment when the coal city of Huaibei was expanding rapidly. In December 1978, with the approval of the State Council, the branch became an independent institution named Huaibei Coal Industry Teachers College, also rendered as Huaibei Coal Teachers College, affiliated to the then Ministry of Coal Industry and recruiting students from across the country. In 1981 it was approved to award bachelor's degrees.

For two decades the college's identity was bound to the coal industry that built Huaibei. In September 1998, under the reform of China's higher-education administration, it moved to a system of co-construction by central and local government with Anhui Province as the main administrator. In March 2010, approved by the Ministry of Education, it was renamed Huaibei Normal University, marking its development from a specialised coal-industry teachers college into a multi-disciplinary provincial key university.

The university today

The university has two campuses, Xiangshan and Binhu, covering more than three thousand mu. Institutional and reference profiles describe a multi-disciplinary university with enrolment surpassing twenty thousand students and more than twelve hundred academic staff, teaching across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. It has been recognised repeatedly as a civilised unit of Anhui Province and as a civilised campus. Its address on Dongshan Road in Huaibei places its older campus in the city that grew up around the mines, while the newer Binhu campus reflects the city's southward expansion.

That growth frames the journal's contents. A university serving a resource-based city in transition needs research on education, on local history and environment, and on the sciences that support new industries, and its journal is where much of that locally grounded work first appears in print.

The Sui-Tang Grand Canal and Liuzi

The most distinctive regional scholarship associated with Huaibei concerns the Grand Canal of the Sui and Tang dynasties. The Tongji Canal, dug under the Sui dynasty and known as the Bian River in Tang and Song times, flowed for more than forty kilometres through what is now Suixi County in Huaibei. At Liuzi, the canal town flourished for some five hundred years as a place where goods moving between north and south China were loaded and traded.

Excavations at the Liuzi canal site in 1999 and 2012 transformed understanding of the canal. They uncovered the river channel, embankments, stone bridge piers and roads, together with wooden shipwrecks of the Tang dynasty and large quantities of ceramics from more than twenty kilns across China, as well as bone and horn artefacts, stone anchors and copper coins. The stone bridge piers were the first such discovery among Grand Canal architectural sites, and the concentration of shipwrecks in a canal channel was unprecedented. The Liuzi site has been listed as part of the Grand Canal's World Heritage property, and Huaibei's museum, formally the China Sui and Tang Grand Canal Museum, holds more than ten thousand relics, over seventy per cent of them from the Liuzi excavations, displayed in halls devoted to Sui and Tang porcelain, Han dynasty stone reliefs and canal remains.

For the journal's social science edition, this archaeology is a rich local subject: canal history, porcelain studies, regional trade and heritage protection all connect the university's historians and archaeologists to a site of national importance within their own prefecture.

A coal city in transition

Huaibei describes itself as an energy city built and developed on the coal industry. It sits in northern Anhui, bordering Jiangsu, Shandong and Henan, and is described as the biggest energy base in East China, with prospective coal reserves measured in tens of billions of tons, including coking coal and other varieties rare in China, large thermal power plants, and pillar industries spanning coal mining, power, spirits-making, textiles and building materials.

Resource cities of this kind face a common long-term question: how an economy and a society built on extraction adapt as resources decline and industries change. The journal's record identifies coal-city transition studies as one of its regional themes. Scholarship of that sort, examining industrial restructuring, urban change and the environment of Huaibei itself, gives a university journal a civic function beyond the campus, contributing analysis to the debate about its own city's future.

Scope across the two editions

The Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition carries the university's work in literature, history, law, education, economics and the canal and regional studies described above. The Natural Science Edition carries mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences and related applied research from the university's science departments. Together the editions present the whole range of a comprehensive normal university: the training of teachers, the study of the region's past, and scientific research addressed to the needs of northern Anhui.

Teacher education remains a thread through both editions. The university was founded to supply teachers, first for the coal city's schools and then for the wider region, and education research, subject pedagogy and studies of the basic-education system form a standing part of its publishing, as they do in normal university journals across China.

Huaibei: an ancient land and a young city

Provincial introductions stress the contrast in Huaibei's identity: young as a modern industrial city, yet long inhabited. Human settlement is traced to the Neolithic age, and the city has yielded fine Han dynasty stone reliefs and Tang and Song porcelain in quantity. The discovery of the Liuzi pier demonstrated that the area was a major commercial town some fourteen hundred years ago. That layered past, Neolithic settlement, Han carving, Tang canal trade and twentieth-century coal, gives the journal's humanities contributors an unusually deep local archive to work on.

The university's own museum-facing and heritage environment reinforces the connection. The Sui and Tang Grand Canal Museum building was designed to combine coal culture with canal culture, symbolising the industrial city as a ship moving through the long river of history, an image that captures the double inheritance, coal and canal, that the university's scholarship addresses.

The journal in China's xuebao tradition

Like other Chinese university journals, the Journal of Huaibei Normal University is edited and published by its host institution in Chinese and circulates chiefly within China's academic system, where such journals are the standard first venue for regional research, education studies and the early work of university scholars. Its two-edition structure is conventional. What distinguishes it is its setting: a normal university in a canal-and-coal city, whose scholars work on World Heritage archaeology and on the economics of resource-city transition at the same time.

Why the journal matters

The journal matters as the printed record of northern Anhui's principal normal university. Its pages connect three stories that rarely meet elsewhere: the training of the region's teachers since 1974, the rediscovery of the Sui-Tang canal at Liuzi, and the effort of a coal city to imagine its next economy. For readers mapping China's regional scholarship, it is a clear example of how a provincial university journal documents the place that created it, in this case a city built twice over, first by a canal and then by coal.