About Journal of Minjiang University

Journal of Minjiang University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Minjiang University, in Chinese Minjiang Xueyuan Xuebao, is the Chinese-language scholarly journal of Minjiang University in Fuzhou, the capital of Fujian Province. It is a comprehensive academic journal, published for readers in China and abroad, carrying research in the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences from the provincial capital's municipal undergraduate university. Its history is longer than its present title suggests: the journal was formerly the journal of Fuzhou Teachers' College and was founded in 1981, so that its volumes span the entire transformation of its host from a teachers' college into a comprehensive, application-oriented university.

Few Chinese university journals can claim a host institution with a more remarkable modern history. One of the university's two predecessor institutions, Minjiang Vocational University, was led for six years by Xi Jinping during his tenure in Fuzhou, and the educational philosophy he set out for it still guides the university today. The journal's pages are the scholarly record of the institution that grew from those foundations.

Origins: the journal of Fuzhou Teachers' College, founded in 1981

According to the university's published history, the Journal of Minjiang University, formerly known as the journal of Fuzhou Teachers' College, was founded in 1981. In 2002, when the institution was upgraded to an undergraduate university, the journal continued as a comprehensive academic journal published in China and abroad. It has been included in China Journal Network, the China Academic Journal CD edition, the Wanfang Data digital journal group and Chinese science and technology journal databases, the standard channels through which Chinese scholarly articles circulate digitally.

A founding date of 1981 places the journal in the first years of China's reform era, when universities and colleges across the country were founding or refounding academic journals as scholarly life revived. Fuzhou Teachers' College trained the teachers of the provincial capital, and its journal gave those teachers and their colleagues a refereed venue for education research, literature, history and science. When the college merged into the new Minjiang University in 2002, the journal's remit widened with its host, from a normal college's scholarship to the full disciplinary range of a comprehensive university, without breaking publication continuity.

The host university: a merger of 1958 and 1984 institutions

Minjiang University is a full-time regular undergraduate institution approved by the Ministry of Education, located in Fuzhou. In 2002, Fuzhou Teachers' College, founded in 1958, merged with Minjiang Vocational University, founded in 1984 and incorporating the Fuzhou Arts and Crafts School in 2001, to form the university. In 2010, Fujian Conservatory of Music, founded by the patriotic overseas Chinese Cai Jikun, was merged into it as well. The university is supported by both Fujian Province and Fuzhou Municipality, with the city playing the major role, and it operates under a system of joint provincial and municipal construction led by the province and centred on the city, as the 2002 approval prescribed.

The predecessor histories reward attention. Fuzhou Teachers' College, founded in 1958, was renamed Fuzhou Normal University in 1960, merged into Nanping Teachers' College in 1961, later re-established, renamed Fuzhou Teachers' College again in July 1981, the very year its journal was founded, and moved to a new site on Changle Road in 1987. Minjiang Vocational University was established in July 1984 with provincial approval, absorbed Fuzhou Vocational College of Journalism in 1986 and maintained a branch in Mawei, the historic port district, between 1988 and 1991. On 21 March 2002 the Ministry of Education approved the creation of the new university on the basis of their merger. The journal founded in 1981 is the one element of scholarly publishing that runs continuously through this complicated institutional story.

Xi Jinping's presidency of Minjiang Vocational University

The university's official history records that Xi Jinping, during his tenure in Fuzhou as Secretary of the Fuzhou Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, concurrently served as President of Minjiang Vocational University for six years, from June 1990 to May 1996. The education philosophy he put forward for the institution, rendered in English as seeking not the biggest, but the excellent, and the most adaptable to social demands, together with the objective to base the university on Fuzhou, orient it to the market, focus on quality and highlight application, became Minjiang's guiding ideology for running the university. Official accounts describe the theoretical, practical and institutional achievements of those years as an invaluable legacy for the institution.

On 25 March 2021, Xi Jinping inspected the university and delivered an important speech, which the university describes as charting the course for its reform and development in the new era. For the journal, this history is context rather than content, but it is significant context: the institution whose scholarship it publishes is one whose direction was personally shaped by China's national leader, and whose application-oriented mission, the commitment to serve Fuzhou and Fujian rather than to pursue size, continues to define the research its scholars choose to do.

An application-oriented university in the provincial capital

Minjiang University has evolved into a highly regarded application-oriented undergraduate university with a comprehensive range of disciplines. Its official introduction lists fifteen colleges, an MBA programme and bachelor's programmes across eight major disciplines: economics, law, literature, history, science, engineering, management and fine arts. It enrolls about 16,000 to 18,000 full-time students in published accounts, with a faculty of more than 1,000, of whom over 45 percent hold doctorates in one recent account. Its campuses, centred on the main campus in Fuzhou University Town at Shangjie in Minhou County, cover some 2,294.6 mu in that account, with library holdings of more than two million paper books and several million electronic books, and teaching and research equipment valued in the hundreds of millions of yuan.

The university was among the first pilot institutions for master's education serving special national needs, and is described as a model institution for deepening reform of innovation and entrepreneurship education and as a priority for provincial support and top-level discipline construction. Its research infrastructure includes provincial key laboratories, a provincial engineering research centre, an academician and expert workstation and numerous provincial and municipal science and technology innovation platforms and think tanks. Earlier published figures credited its teachers with undertaking more than 1,600 research projects at all levels, publishing more than 5,800 academic papers and editing more than 200 academic works, figures that indicate the volume of scholarship from which a comprehensive journal draws.

Scope: humanities, social sciences and natural sciences

As a comprehensive journal, the title publishes across the university's eight disciplines. Humanities work includes literature, history and the arts, strengthened since 2010 by the incorporation of Fujian Conservatory of Music, whose founder Cai Jikun adds a notable chapter of overseas Chinese educational philanthropy to the university's inheritance. Social science work includes economics, law and management, pursued in a capital city that is also a major port and manufacturing centre. Natural science and engineering work reflects the applied character of the university, including the digital economy fields developed through its International Digital Economy College, co-founded with European University Cyprus as a Sino-foreign cooperative institution.

The record for this journal notes Min River basin and maritime Fujian regional features among its characteristics. The Min River, from which the university takes its name, is Fujian's largest river, flowing through Fuzhou to the sea, and its basin defines the province's economic and cultural heartland. Research on the basin's ecology, its cities, its history and its industries, and on maritime Fujian more broadly, the province's seafaring, trading and emigrant culture, gives the journal a regional identity within its general coverage, as regional study does for university journals across China.

Fuzhou, the Min River and maritime Fujian

Fuzhou is one of China's historic port cities, the capital of Fujian and the political, economic and cultural centre of the Min River basin. Its shipyard at Mawei was a birthplace of modern Chinese naval and industrial education, its merchants and emigrants travelled throughout Southeast Asia and beyond, and its districts preserve a celebrated heritage of lanes, alleys, temples and residences. A university named for the Min River, administered principally by the Fuzhou municipal government, exists to serve this city, and its journal inevitably reflects the city's concerns: urban development, digital economy, cultural heritage protection, marine industries and the history of Fujian's engagement with the wider world.

The university's external relationships reinforce that orientation. It maintains cooperation with high-level universities in China, including a counterpart assistance relationship with Renmin University of China and cooperation with Fuzhou University, and friendly cooperative relations with more than forty to fifty universities overseas in published accounts, in the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and elsewhere. It has run a Confucius Institute at Brock University in Canada and established Fuzhou Melbourne Polytechnic, described as Fujian's first Sino-foreign joint venture institution with independent legal personality. Scholarship informed by those exchanges, and by the university's extensive cooperation with universities in Taiwan, enters the journal alongside purely local work.

The journal within Chinese academic publishing

The Journal of Minjiang University belongs to the national system of university xuebao, but its biography illustrates two wider stories in Chinese academic publishing. The first is continuity through merger: as China's higher education consolidated hundreds of colleges into comprehensive universities around the turn of the century, journals founded by small teachers' colleges became the journals of much larger institutions, carrying their founding volumes and editorial traditions with them. The second is digitisation: inclusion in China Journal Network, the China Academic Journal CD edition and the Wanfang digital journal group moved the journal from a print periodical read mainly in Fujian to a database title whose individual articles are discoverable by scholars anywhere in China.

For its authors, principally the university's own faculty with contributors from elsewhere, the journal offers a refereed home for Fuzhou-focused and applied research that national disciplinary journals may consider too local, together with a general venue for the humanities and sciences of a comprehensive university. For its readers, it offers a continuing record, unbroken since 1981, of scholarly life in the Fujian capital's municipal university.

Continuing significance

The journal's significance is cumulative. Founded in 1981 as a teachers' college journal, renamed and widened in 2002 as its host became a university, and continuing through the university's growth into a fifteen-college, application-oriented institution inspected and encouraged at the highest national level in 2021, it documents forty years of Fuzhou scholarship in a single continuing title. Its volumes record the changing concerns of the Min River basin's capital: from teacher training and basic disciplines to digital economy, innovation and entrepreneurship and international cooperation.

The Journal of Minjiang University remains the comprehensive scholarly journal of Minjiang University in Fuzhou, Fujian, publishing humanities, social science and natural science research with Min River basin and maritime Fujian regional features. As the university develops under the philosophy set out for it in the 1990s, not the biggest, but the excellent and the most adaptable to social demands, its journal will continue to publish the research by which that ambition is pursued and judged.