About Journal of People's Public Security University of China (Social Sciences Edition)

Journal of People's Public Security University of China (Social Sciences Edition)

The Journal of People's Public Security University of China (Social Sciences Edition) is a Chinese-language academic journal published bimonthly in Beijing by the People's Public Security University of China, the national police university administered by China's Ministry of Public Security. Its Chinese title is 中国人民公安大学学报（社会科学版）. It covers policing, criminology, law, public security management and related social-science research for police education and practice. The university records that the Social Sciences Edition is a national core Chinese journal, a National Top 100 Social Science Journal, and a core journal of China humanities and social sciences — distinctions that make it the senior Chinese journal of police social science.

A police university's journal is a professional instrument as much as a scholarly one. China's public security system is one of the world's largest policing establishments, and its university in Beijing trains its senior officers and produces its research. This journal is where that research — on police power, police organisation, crime and the law of public order — is published in the social sciences.

The publishing university

The People's Public Security University of China (PPSUC) was founded in July 1948, originating as the North China Police Cadre School and passing through successive identities — Central Police Cadre School, Central People's Police School, Central Political and Legal Cadre School — before being established as a university with bachelor's and master's programmes in January 1984. The present university was formed in the 1998 amalgamation with the People's Police Officers University of China (itself founded in 1978 as an institute of international politics), after which it has been ranked as China's best police academy. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Public Security, forms part of the national Double First-Class construction, and describes itself as the first public security university under the ministry, excelling in police science and police technology, offering the most such programmes in the country, and serving as an important base for producing professionals with policing competence and global vision.

The university now has two campuses — at Muxidi in Xicheng District and at Tuanhe in Daxing District, Beijing — and teaches through a law school and departments covering criminal investigation, criminology, management, information security, traffic control, forensic science and foreign languages, sharing its site with the Senior Police College of the Ministry of Public Security. It hosts several publications, among them Public Security Education, Modern World Police, Police Digest and this journal, whose Social Sciences Edition carries the honours recorded above.

Two editions of one university journal

The journal exists as the social sciences edition of the university's学报 (institutional journal) — the standard Chinese pattern in which a university's journal is divided by field, with this edition carrying the humanities and social sciences and a companion natural-science side addressing police technology. The edition structure matters for readers: the Social Sciences Edition is the venue for law, criminology, police management and social research, distinct from the forensic and technical scholarship published elsewhere in the university's periodicals.

Its standing is certified at national level. To be a national core Chinese journal, one of the National Top 100 Social Science Journals, and a core journal in the Academy's humanities and social sciences system is to hold the three standard marks of a leading Chinese social-science periodical — achieved here by a specialised police journal competing against the comprehensive journals of all China's universities.

Scope: the social sciences of policing

The journal covers policing, criminology, law, public security management and related social-science research. Its intellectual home discipline, public security studies, is characterised in Chinese scholarship as a branch of legal studies concerned with the fundamental theories, laws and practical methods of public security work — the social-science pillar of police education, alongside police technology's engineering pillar.

Its documented contents show that scope in action. The journal has published special research on the allocation of police power in China — analysing its status quo, problems and causes — and, in volume 37 (2021), an examination of the value orientation, evolutionary logic and reform path of China's modern police mechanism. These are characteristic subjects: the constitutional and organisational questions of police authority, and the institutional design of the police system itself, treated as scholarly problems by the university that trains the system's officers.

Function: research for police education and practice

The journal serves police education and practice. Its readers include the university's own faculty and cadets, the faculty of China's other police colleges, researchers in criminology and public security law, and practitioners following the scholarly treatment of their profession. Chinese writing on research in police colleges cites the journal as a model venue — the standard against which police-college scholarship measures itself.

That dual scholarly-professional function shapes its contents toward usable knowledge: studies of police power and its legal control, of police system reform, of crime and social order, and of the management of public security organisations. Where a general law review's articles on police power address the legal academy, this journal's address the academy and the service at once — one reason its treatment of subjects like police power allocation has been cited in the wider legal literature as well.

Publication pattern and identification

The journal is published bimonthly in Beijing — six issues a year — in Chinese, by the People's Public Security University of China. Its volume numbering in recent years (volume 37 in 2021) reflects the long run of the university journal from which the edition descends. It is distributed through the Chinese academic journal system and indexed in the national databases through which Chinese social-science journals are read.

Bibliographic identification should use the full title with its edition designation — Journal of People's Public Security University of China (Social Sciences Edition) — since the university's name itself has English variants in the literature ("Chinese People's Public Security University" appears in older citations) and the natural-science counterpart shares the journal's main title. The Chinese title, 中国人民公安大学学报（社会科学版）, is unambiguous.

The university's wider publishing

The journal sits within a small family of PPSUC publications that together serve the police profession's reading: Public Security Education for the pedagogy of police training, Modern World Police for international policing, and Police Digest among them. Within that family, the Social Sciences Edition is the research journal — the one carrying the national core and top-100 honours, and the one through which the university's scholarship enters the general Chinese social-science citation system.

The university's research profile extends that reach: its scholars publish across criminology, forensic science and public security studies, and its journal gives that output a home venue of national standing, edited from the Muxidi campus in central Beijing.

Authors and contributors

The journal's contributors are drawn from the university's own faculties — its law school and its departments of criminology, public security management, criminal investigation and related fields — and from the wider Chinese community of police colleges, law schools and public security research institutes. That authorship pattern gives its pages their characteristic mixture: doctrinal legal analysis from law professors, institutional and managerial studies from public security specialists, and criminological research from the discipline's researchers, all addressed to the common subject of policing in China.

For police-college scholars nationally, the journal is the discipline's senior destination: publication in the national police university's core-listed journal carries recognition across the whole public security education system, which is one reason its special studies — on police power, on police mechanism reform — are cited well beyond the police colleges themselves.

Place in Chinese scholarship

Police social science in China has one national university, and this is its journal. Law and Social Development has its theory centre in Changchun; the comprehensive reviews sit in Beijing and Shanghai; but for the scholarly study of policing — police power, police organisation, criminology and public security management — the Journal of People's Public Security University of China (Social Sciences Edition) is the field's senior Chinese periodical, published bimonthly by the ministry's own university.

Its honours summarise its position: national core journal, National Top 100 Social Science Journal, core journal of Chinese humanities and social sciences. For researchers on Chinese policing, it is a primary source — the place where the Chinese police establishment's own university publishes its social science.