About Journal of Xi'an International Studies University

Journal of Xi'an International Studies University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Xi'an International Studies University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Xi'an International Studies University (XISU) in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province. It is the scholarly periodical of the northwest's principal foreign-language university, and it publishes foreign linguistics and literature, translation studies, international relations and regional studies. Among its recognisable emphases are Central Asian and Silk Road research, reflecting both the university's location in China's historic northwest gateway and its service area, which stretches from Shaanxi across the vast northwest to Xinjiang.

University sources list the journal among the institution's academic journals, alongside titles devoted to foreign-language teaching and to human geography. That trio is a fair map of the university itself: a foreign-languages core, a strong education tradition, and a regional-studies interest in the lands west of Xi'an along the old Silk Road. The Journal of Xi'an International Studies University is the general title of the three, carrying the university's name and its broadest humanities and social-science remit.

The university: from Northwest Russian School to XISU

Xi'an International Studies University was established in 1952 as the Northwest College of Russian, formed from Russian-language units drawn from Lanzhou University, Northwest University and the Northwest Bureau party school. It is counted among the four oldest foreign-language teaching institutions of the People's Republic, and it remains the only university in the northwest with a full range of major foreign languages. In 1958 it was renamed Xi'an Foreign Languages Institute, the name it carried for nearly half a century.

The institute began graduate programmes in linguistics and literature in 1979 and was approved to grant master's degrees in 1986. In 1995 it merged with the Shaanxi Foreign Language School, whose site became its Yanta campus, and in 2005 its Chang'an campus was completed in the university district south of the city. Approved by the Ministry of Education, it was renamed Xi'an International Studies University in 2006, marking its development from a single-subject language institute into a multidisciplinary university with humanities at its core and social sciences, management and other fields developing alongside. It was later approved as a doctoral-granting institution in foreign language and literature. The journal's present name dates from that 2006 renaming, continuing the institute's periodical under the university title.

Xi'an and the Silk Road setting

Few university journals are as place-specific in their opportunities as this one. Xi'an, the ancient capital known to the world for the Terracotta Army, was Chang'an, the eastern terminus of the Silk Road and for centuries one of the largest cities on earth. The modern university's regional-studies work takes that inheritance seriously: Central Asia, the states of the Silk Road Economic Belt, and the languages and societies between Xi'an and Europe are natural subjects for a foreign-languages university seated at the road's starting point.

The northwest service area reinforces the emphasis. XISU describes its catchment as spanning the huge territory from Shaanxi to Xinjiang, a region of many languages — Chinese, Turkic, Mongolic, Tibetan and others — and of direct land borders with Central Asia. Linguistics, translation and regional research published by the university's journal therefore frequently engages multilingual societies and cross-border questions that a coastal university would encounter only at a distance.

Scope: linguistics, literature and translation

The journal's core fields are foreign linguistics and literature and translation studies, mirroring the university's first-level discipline of foreign language and literature, in which it holds doctoral rights. Linguistics contributions address the languages the university teaches — a range that has grown from its Russian foundation to cover the major European and Asian languages — while literature contributions treat the literatures of those language areas and their reception in China. Translation studies, a professional as well as scholarly strength of the university, which trains translators and interpreters for the northwest, forms the third core strand.

These fields define the journal's difference from a general humanities学报. Where a comprehensive university's journal spreads across all the humanities, this journal concentrates where its institution is strongest, and its editorial judgements are made within a faculty whose daily work is language teaching and research. For Chinese scholars of foreign languages in the northwest, it is one of the home journals of their discipline; for the university, it is the printed record of the discipline on which its national standing rests.

Scope: international relations and regional studies

International relations and regional studies extend the journal beyond language and literature. The university maintains research units devoted to area studies — its listed institutes and centres have included American, Australian, Spanish and Latin American, Austrian and comparative-culture research bodies, among others — and the journal provides an outlet for that work. In the Belt and Road era, Central Asian studies have particular weight: Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and their neighbours are China's immediate western partners, and a Xi'an university is geographically and linguistically equipped to study them.

This regional strand also connects the journal to policy-relevant scholarship. Language capacity and country knowledge are inputs into trade, diplomacy and cultural exchange, and research published in a foreign-studies university journal often addresses an audience that includes the government and commercial users of that knowledge in the northwest. The journal thus illustrates a wider truth about China's foreign-language universities: their scholarship has always served both academic and national purposes, from the Russian training of the 1950s to the Silk Road research of the present.

The university's journal family

XISU's publishing programme, as described in institutional profiles, includes three academic journals concerned respectively with foreign-language teaching, human geography and the university's general scholarship. The presence of a human geography journal is a distinctive XISU trait, reflecting a research tradition that joined language study to the study of the regions where languages are spoken — a combination well suited to the northwest. The Journal of Xi'an International Studies University sits at the centre of this small family as the title bearing the university's name.

The journal's institutional position matters for its contents. It is edited within a university of some twenty thousand students offering more than forty undergraduate programmes across literature, economics, management, law, education, science and the arts, yet it keeps a humanities and international-studies centre of gravity rather than attempting to cover the whole institution. That focus is a deliberate feature of the stronger Chinese university journals, which increasingly define a field identity instead of serving as undifferentiated house organs.

The G8 foreign-studies context

Xi'an International Studies University belongs to the group of eight Chinese universities specialising in foreign languages and international studies, and it is one of the four founded in the first years of the People's Republic. Each of those universities publishes journals, and together they form the core periodical literature of China's foreign-language discipline: the Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing, Tianjin, Dalian, Chengdu-region and Xi'an titles are the standard domestic venues for linguistics, literature and translation research outside the comprehensive universities.

Within that family, the Xi'an journal's identity is its northwestern and Silk Road orientation. The coastal members of the group face the Pacific and the maritime world; XISU faces the continental interior and Eurasia. Its journal's attention to Central Asia and to the languages of the land Silk Road is therefore not a decorative theme but the expression of the institution's assigned place in China's foreign-language education geography — the university the system maintains in the northwest, publishing for and about the regions to China's west.

Readership and use

The journal's primary readers are Chinese scholars, teachers and graduate students in foreign languages, translation and area studies, with a particular concentration in the northwest, where XISU is the leading institution of its kind. Its articles are used in the ordinary ways of Chinese humanities scholarship: cited in dissertations and journal articles, assigned in graduate seminars, and counted in the evaluation systems through which Chinese universities assess research output in the discipline.

For readers outside China, the journal is encountered mainly through bibliographic records and through citation in China-related linguistics and area-studies literature. It is a Chinese-language title without a parallel English edition, and World News Media records it accordingly: a magazine-category entry for China, based in Xi'an, Shaanxi, sponsored by Xi'an International Studies University, defined by foreign linguistics and literature, translation studies, international relations and Silk Road regional research.

Development alongside the university

The journal's trajectory follows the university's three phases: the Russian-school years, when a small specialist institute had limited publishing; the institute decades after 1958, when graduate education and a broadening language portfolio supported a regular scholarly periodical; and the university era after 2006, when doctoral rights in foreign language and literature, a postdoctoral station and an expanded research-institute structure raised the volume and ambition of the scholarship the journal could draw on. Each phase widened the pool of authors and the range of languages and regions the journal could credibly cover.

That growth also reflects national policy. China's demand for language specialists has expanded from a handful of languages in the 1950s to the scores of languages now taught across the foreign-studies universities, driven by trade, diplomacy and the Belt and Road Initiative. A journal founded in the orbit of a Russian training school now publishes on the languages and regions of a continent — a transformation that the journal's own contents, decade by decade, document more concretely than any institutional history.

Profile summary

The Journal of Xi'an International Studies University is the general academic journal of the northwest's foreign-languages university, seated in the ancient Silk Road capital of Xi'an. Sponsored by an institution founded in 1952, renamed a university in 2006 and holding doctoral rights in foreign language and literature, it publishes linguistics, literature, translation studies, international relations and regional studies, with a characteristic Central Asian and Silk Road emphasis. It belongs to the journal family of China's eight foreign-studies universities and serves the Chinese-language scholarly community of its disciplines.

World News Media lists it under magazines for China, in Xi'an, Shaanxi. Researchers seeking its articles should search Chinese academic databases under the university's Chinese name, Xi'an Waiguoyu Daxue, where the journal's full run under both its institute and university titles can be traced.