About Journal of Ningde Normal University

Journal of Ningde Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Ningde Normal University is the Chinese-language academic journal — Ningde Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao — of Ningde Normal University in Ningde, in north-eastern Fujian Province. It is published in two editions, one for philosophy and social sciences and one for the natural sciences, a division common among Chinese normal-university journals and one that mirrors the host institution's double role as a teacher-training university and a regional comprehensive university. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here; the journal's identity is documented instead through its host, its two-edition structure and its regional research programme in the culture of Mindong — eastern Fujian.

Ningde and the Mindong region

Ningde, also known as Mindong — literally “east of Fujian” — is a prefecture-level city on the north-eastern coast of Fujian. It borders Fuzhou, the provincial capital, to the south, Wenzhou in Zhejiang to the north and Nanping to the west. The prefecture administers one district, two county-level cities and six counties, spans about 13,500 square kilometres, and combines a mountainous interior with almost 200 kilometres of coastline on the East China Sea. Magistrate rule in the area dates to 282 under the Jin dynasty; in 1736 Ningde was promoted within the Funing prefectural administration, and in June 1971 the region was promoted to Ningde Prefecture. In more recent political history, Xi Jinping served as party chief of Ningde between 1988 and 1990, a period of local poverty-alleviation work that remains part of the city's modern identity.

The majority of the population speaks Eastern Min, and the prefecture is the primary residential region for the She ethnic minority within Fujian — a fact that shapes the university's research mission directly.

The She people and ethnic-culture research

The She are an ethnic group living primarily in the border region between coastal Fujian and Zhejiang, with smaller communities in Guangdong, Jiangxi and Anhui. They have lived alongside Han communities for centuries, most now speak Chinese languages, and they traditionally cultivate rice and tea in mountain villages at elevations between roughly 500 and 1,500 metres. Pan, Lan, Lei and Zhong are the most common She surnames, reflecting the group's traditional origin account. Ningde's She population is proportionally one of the largest in China, and the preservation of She language, song, dress and ritual is a live cultural question in the prefecture.

Ningde Normal University has built institutional capacity around exactly this subject. Its College of Languages and Cultures hosts the She Ethnic Culture Research Center of the Fujian provincial humanities and social sciences research base system, alongside a Ningde cultural research centre and platforms for cross-Strait ethnic cultural exchange. The university library maintains characteristic collections on She nationality culture and red culture, and the campus includes a She Nationality Cultural Education Center recognised as a national unity and progress education base. A research and innovation team devoted to the cultural inheritance and development of the She ethnic group works alongside teams on Mindong local culture and Mindong red culture. The journal's social-science edition is the natural publication outlet for this cluster of work.

Taimu Mountain, the coast and natural-science research

The natural-science edition draws on an equally distinctive environment. Mount Taimu, in Fuding city within the prefecture, is known as the “immortal mountain on the sea”: a granite peak cluster overlooking the East China Sea, classified as a top-grade scenic area since 2013 and forming part of the Ningde UNESCO Global Geopark, created in 2015 from the Taimushan, Baishuiyang and Baiyunshan scenic areas. UNESCO describes the geopark's miarolitic granite “stone egg” landforms as among the best developed in south-east China, and Baishuiyang's flat bedrock riverbed as exceptionally rare.

The coast adds a second research environment: the Xiapu mudflats, among the most famous coastal landscapes in China, and a fishing and aquaculture economy that defines local life along the prefecture's 200 kilometres of shoreline. Geology, coastal ecology, aquaculture and tourism research from this mountain-and-sea setting give the natural-science edition a regional character within its general scope, complementing the teacher-education science the university also produces.

Ningde Normal University: the host institution

The university's predecessor was Fu'an Teachers College, established in 1958. When the institution was reopened in 1978 it took the Ningde Teachers College name, and in March 2010 the Ministry of Education approved its upgrading to undergraduate level as Ningde Normal University. It was awarded bachelor's-degree granting status in 2014, passed the Ministry's undergraduate teaching qualification assessment in 2016, established a secondary medical school in 2017 and began jointly training master's students in 2018.

The university covers more than 1,200 acres across two campuses, Dongqiao and Jiaocheng, and its library holds over 950,000 paper books, more than a million e-books and extensive electronic journal and dissertation collections, including access to the CNKI journal database in which its own journal circulates. Its stated strategy is to take root in eastern Fujian and develop in step with the local region — expressed institutionally in ventures such as the Mindong Rural Revitalization College and industry colleges built with local enterprise partners.

Red culture and the “Light of Mindong”

A third strand of the university's work, visible in the journal's social-science field, is the red culture of eastern Fujian. The university has built two central exhibition halls — the Mindong Light Red Cultural Education Center and the She Nationality Cultural Education Center — which together serve as a national unity and progress education base, a provincial excellent cultural inheritance base and one of Fujian's first college party-member education bases. With the Ningde municipal publicity department it co-builds a collaborative innovation centre for “Propagating the Light of Mindong”, and its cultural projects run with counties across the prefecture. Student and craft culture reinforces the same themes: associations for paper-cutting and tea art, a workshop for Zherong paper-cut derivative art — Zherong being a Ningde county known for that craft — and a studio for the inheritance of Mindong She song. Research teams on Mindong red culture work alongside those on local culture and She inheritance, giving the journal a connected body of work on how the prefecture remembers its revolutionary past and presents its ethnic and folk culture today.

Teacher education and the regional mission

As a normal university, the institution's core mission remains the training of teachers for eastern Fujian's schools, and education research — curriculum, pedagogy and the schooling of a largely rural, partly ethnic-minority prefecture — is a standing theme for the journal's social-science edition. The addition of a medical school in 2017 extended that public-service mission into regional healthcare training, another field in which a prefectural university's journal can document practice that metropolitan titles rarely see.

The two editions in Fujian's journal system

Fujian's normal universities and colleges form a ladder of teacher-training institutions, each with its journal, and Ningde's is the voice of the province's north-eastern corner. Its closest comparators — the journals of Minnan Normal University in Zhangzhou and Quanzhou Normal University — share the two-edition structure and the teacher-education base, but neither shares Ningde's combination of She ethnic studies and a UNESCO geopark coastline. The Mindong focus is the title's distinguishing asset: “Propagating the Light of Mindong” is the name the university itself gives to its collaborative cultural work with the city, and the journal is where that work appears in scholarly form.

Readership and continuing role

The journal serves scholars of ethnic culture, Fujian regional studies and teacher education, alongside natural scientists working on the geology and coastal environments of the north-eastern Fujian coast. For a university upgraded to undergraduate status only in 2010, the journal — in both its editions — is the established channel through which its research teams on She culture, Mindong history and coastal science reach the national academic conversation, published in Chinese from the prefecture those teams study.