About Journal of Shangrao Normal University

Journal of Shangrao Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Shangrao Normal University, known in Chinese as Shangrao Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao, is the Chinese-language academic journal of Shangrao Normal University in Shangrao, Jiangxi Province, China. It is the comprehensive scholarly journal of northeastern Jiangxi's teacher-training university, publishing humanities, social-science and natural-science research. Reference accounts of the university record that the journal appears in social science and natural science editions, and that the social science edition has received national honours unusual for a journal of its tier.

Shangrao Normal University, in Chinese Shangrao Shifan Xueyuan, is formally a normal college in status, a teacher's college serving the northeast of Jiangxi from the city of Shangrao. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and no claim is made here about the journal's numbering or frequency beyond the two-edition structure recorded in accounts of the university.

History of the host: 1958, closure, restoration and the 2000 upgrade

The university was established in August 1958 as Shangrao Normal Junior College. In 1959 it was renamed Gan Dong Bei University, Northeastern Jiangxi University, an ambitious name reflecting the institution's intended regional role. Like many Chinese colleges of its generation, it closed during the Cultural Revolution. It was restored in 1977, with State Council approval, again as Shangrao Normal College, and in March 2000, with the approval of the Ministry of Education and the Jiangxi provincial government, it was upgraded to undergraduate status under its present name, Shangrao Normal University.

The university describes itself as the only full-time undergraduate university in northeastern Jiangxi, with a profound cultural heritage and a revolutionary tradition. Its campus, of some 983 mu in one account, stands in Shangrao south of Zhimin Avenue, near the foothills by the former site of the Shangrao concentration camp, the wartime prison complex whose history forms part of the city's twentieth-century memory, and close to the Zhejiang-Jiangxi railway corridor that has long tied Shangrao to its neighbouring provinces. A journal published by this institution inherits both identities: a regional teachers' college and a university in a city layered with revolutionary and cultural history.

A recognised social science edition

One account of the university singles out its journal for honours that deserve recording precisely because they are exceptional at this level of Chinese academic publishing. The social science edition of the Journal of Shangrao Normal University has been rated, in that account, among the national double top ten journals of liberal arts, among the national top 100 social science journals, and as a core journal of Chinese university journals in the humanities and social sciences. The natural science edition, the same account records, is included in the abstracting scope of Chinese Mathematical Abstracts and Chinese Physical Abstracts.

Such ratings matter in the Chinese xuebao system, where hundreds of institutional journals compete for scholarly standing and where national evaluations of university social-science journals are a recognised measure of editorial quality. A prefectural normal college whose social science journal achieves national top-100 standing and core-journal status in its category has built an editorial reputation larger than its institution's size would predict, and that reputation is part of this journal's identity as recorded in the sources.

Zhu Xi studies and the journal's scholarly neighbourhood

The same account of the university describes a research environment in which its journal sits, centred strikingly on Zhu Xi, the Song dynasty philosopher whose synthesis of Neo-Confucianism shaped East Asian thought for centuries. Zhu Xi's ancestral and intellectual ties run through northeastern Jiangxi and neighbouring Wuyuan, and the university maintains a research institute for Zhuzixue, the study of Zhu Xi's thought, listed among its eleven research institutes and recognised as a Jiangxi Province key research base in humanities and social sciences. Together with the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, it has jointly organised a journal of Zhuzixue studies that had published thirteen volumes at the time of the account, with a high reputation at home and abroad.

That Zhuzixue journal is a separate publication from the university's own xuebao, and the two should not be confused. But the presence of a provincial key base for Zhu Xi studies, and of institutes in philosophy, philology, local economic and social development and calligraphy education among the university's research institutes, defines the humanities environment from which the Journal of Shangrao Normal University draws its authors and its strongest material.

Scope across humanities, social and natural sciences

As a comprehensive university journal in two editions, the xuebao publishes across the institution's teaching and research. The social science edition covers literature, history, philosophy, education, economics, law and related fields, including the Zhu Xi and regional-culture scholarship described above. The natural science edition covers mathematics and applied mathematics, physics, chemistry including the organic chemistry represented among the university's research institutes, and agricultural and biological sciences, including the southern Camellia oleifera science institute recorded in its list of research bodies, a subject rooted in the oil-tea camellia cultivation of the Jiangxi hills.

Teacher education runs through both sides of the journal's identity. Shangrao is northeastern Jiangxi's teacher-training institution, responsible for preparing teachers for the region's schools since 1958 in its various forms, and education research, on curriculum, teaching practice and the region's basic education, is a natural standing component of a normal college's journal, alongside the disciplinary scholarship of the staff who train those teachers.

Regional features: the Xinjiang River basin

The description on which this profile is based records the journal's regional features, beginning with Xinjiang River basin culture. The Xinjiang, also rendered as the Xin River, is Shangrao's own river, rising in the Huaiyu Mountains at Mount Sanqing and flowing westward through Shangrao city and across the prefecture to Poyang Lake. Its basin is the historical and geographical frame of northeastern Jiangxi settlement, carrying the region's towns, agriculture and transport, and its culture, the accumulated history, literature, folk practice and waterborne commerce of the basin, is a coherent regional field that a Shangrao journal is uniquely placed to publish.

River-basin framing is a productive habit in Chinese regional scholarship, joining geography and environmental history to literature and social study along a single drainage. For Shangrao, the Xinjiang basin also connects the journal's city readership to the prefecture's wider territory, from the mountain source country in Yushan and Dexing downstream to the Poyang lakeshore counties.

Wuyuan and Sanqingshan studies

The journal's second recorded regional cluster is Wuyuan and Sanqingshan studies. Wuyuan, a county administered by Shangrao, is widely spoken of as some of the most beautiful countryside in China, famous for its rapeseed-flower terraces, its well-preserved Hui-style villages of white walls and black tiles inherited from its centuries within the Huizhou cultural sphere, and its old trees, ancient buildings and cultural relics. It is also the ancestral home of Zhu Xi, which ties the county directly to the university's flagship humanities field.

Sanqingshan, Mount Sanqing, is the granite peak complex at the junction of Yushan County and Dexing city in the east of the prefecture, a UNESCO World Heritage natural site and World Geopark. Its three principal peaks, Yujing, Yuxu and Yuhua, are seen as resembling the three Taoist supreme deities, the Sanqing, seated on the summit; Yujing Peak, at 1,819.9 metres, is the source of the Xin River. Taoist practice on the mountain is traced to the Eastern Jin dynasty alchemist Ge Hong. Scholarship on Sanqingshan therefore spans granite geomorphology, mountain ecology, Taoist history and heritage tourism, giving a Shangrao journal's natural-science and humanities editions a shared regional subject of world-heritage standing.

Fang Zhimin and the revolutionary history of the northeast

The third recorded regional feature is Fang Zhimin revolutionary history. Fang Zhimin, born in Yiyang County in the Shangrao region, was the principal leader of the Northeastern Jiangxi Revolutionary Base Area and of the Red Tenth Army in the early 1930s, and the author of prison writings, including Lovable China, that became classics of Chinese revolutionary literature after his capture and execution in 1935. The base area he led, centred on the Hengfeng and Yiyang country within modern Shangrao, is one of the recognised soviets of the pre-Long March period.

For the university, this history is institutional as well as regional: it claims a revolutionary tradition, its campus stands near the site of the Shangrao concentration camp where many prisoners of the later war years were held, and the Gan Dong Bei name it briefly bore in 1959 invoked the same northeastern Jiangxi base-area geography. A journal that publishes Fang Zhimin and base-area history is documenting the founding modern story of its own prefecture, in the region where that story happened.

Shangrao as a research setting

Shangrao is a large prefecture-level city in northeastern Jiangxi, at the meeting point of four provinces, bordering Zhejiang to the east, Anhui to the north and Fujian, across the Wuyi Mountains, to the south. Historically described as a land of fish and rice, it takes in the fertile Poyang Lake plain in its west, with commodity grain, cotton, oil and fish production, and mountain country in its east and south. Its administrative territory, of two districts, ten counties and the county-level city of Dexing in the account consulted, spans an unusually varied human landscape, from lakeshore fishing counties to Huizhou-cultural Wuyuan and the mining city of Dexing.

That variety is the journal's opportunity. Few prefectural journals can draw, within their own prefecture, on a world heritage mountain, a nationally famous cultural county, a major revolutionary base area, a great philosopher's ancestral homeland and China's largest freshwater lake. The Journal of Shangrao Normal University's recorded regional features map almost exactly onto that endowment.

Readership, authorship and assessment

The journal's readership is the Chinese academic community, led by the university's own staff and students and by scholars in its fields across Jiangxi and China; its nationally rated social science edition gives it a visibility in the university-journal system beyond a purely local circulation. Authorship is drawn principally from the university's departments and its eleven research institutes, in fields from Zhuzixue and philology to mathematics, organic chemistry and Camellia oleifera science, supplemented by outside contributors on its regional and Zhu Xi subjects.

Assessed as a whole, the Journal of Shangrao Normal University is the two-edition comprehensive journal of northeastern Jiangxi's only full-time undergraduate university, an institution founded in 1958, closed in the Cultural Revolution, restored in 1977 and upgraded in 2000. Its recorded distinction, a nationally honoured social science edition, its setting within a university that hosts a provincial key base for Zhu Xi studies, and its regional commitments to the Xinjiang River basin, to Wuyuan and Sanqingshan, and to Fang Zhimin and the northeastern base area, together give it a profile well beyond the generic. Its continuing role is to publish that combination: a teachers' college's general scholarship, raised by a famous regional endowment and an editorial reputation its own national ratings attest.