About Journal of Yuncheng University

Journal of Yuncheng University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Yuncheng University is the Chinese-language academic journal of Yuncheng University in Yuncheng, in the south of Shanxi Province. It is the university's general scholarly periodical, carrying research produced across a comprehensive institution whose teaching spans economics, law, education, literature, history, science, engineering, agriculture, management and art. Citations recorded internationally show the journal well established by the 2020s: it had reached volume 38 in 2020 and volume 39 in 2021, and articles in it carry digital object identifiers in the form 10.15967/j.cnki.cn14-1316/g4, which embeds its Chinese serial designation CN 14-1316/G4. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here.

That volume numbering itself tells a longer story. A study of teacher professional development at the institution was already being published in the journal at volume 27, issue 6, in 2009, under the Chinese title Yuncheng Xueyuan Xuebao, and the journal has continued under the same numbering sequence into its present English rendering as the Journal of Yuncheng University. It is, in other words, not a new or occasional publication but the settled scholarly record of its university, appearing year after year as the institution itself grew from a teachers college into a comprehensive university.

The sponsoring university

Yuncheng University traces its roots to 1978, when it was founded as Yuncheng Teachers College. In December 1989, with the approval of the State Education Commission, the Shanxi Provincial People's Government merged Yuncheng Teachers College, Yuncheng Education College and Hedong University to form the institution in its modern form. In February 2002 the resulting college was formally approved by the Ministry of Education. The university is a public institution under the authority of the Shanxi provincial government, located at 333 East Hedong Street in Yuncheng.

Accounts of the university describe 17 teaching and research units and 51 undergraduate majors covering ten university disciplines, with two national-level specialty construction sites, a pilot major for comprehensive reform of undergraduate programmes in local universities, five provincial specialty construction sites, a provincial key research base in the humanities and social sciences, and a Shanxi "1331 Project" key discipline and innovation team. Its faculty has been reported at about 1,550 members, including more than 1,270 full-time teachers. A journal attached to an institution of that breadth is necessarily multidisciplinary, and the range of work cited from its pages confirms that character.

Yuncheng, Hedong and the salt lake

No profile of this journal is complete without its city, because Yuncheng's identity shapes the local research that a university journal exists in part to publish. Yuncheng, in southwestern Shanxi, was habitually known in earlier times as Hedong, meaning east of the Yellow River, and it stands in the Yellow River golden delta where Shanxi meets Shaanxi and Henan across the river. Human traces in the area have been dated back some 1.8 million years, and local tradition places the territory among the centres of the legendary Xia dynasty, the first dynasty in Chinese historical tradition.

The city's defining resource is its salt lake. Salt extraction at the Yuncheng Salt Lake, also known as the Xiechi pool, has a history measured in more than four thousand years, and Yuncheng has been described as the only city in China established for developing the salt industry — its very name is associated with the transport of salt. Yuncheng is also the hometown of Guan Yu, the late Eastern Han general born in Xie County, in present-day Yuncheng, in 160 AD, later deified as Guandi and revered as an embodiment of loyalty and righteousness. The Guandi Temple at Xiezhou is regarded as the principal temple among the many dedicated to him. A university journal in such a city sits at the meeting point of economic history, folk religion, archaeology and tourism studies, and its pages reflect that inheritance.

Scope as shown by its published articles

The most reliable guide to a general university journal's scope is the work other scholars cite from it, and the cited record for the Journal of Yuncheng University is strikingly varied. In education alone, volume 38 in 2020 carried Tian's exploration of a blended teaching model for international Chinese education courses at Yuncheng University itself, a study of kindergarten teachers' career adaptability and job satisfaction, research on improving the teaching effectiveness of ideological and political courses in the era of mobile media, and work on WeChat-based mobile learning in such courses. A 2021 article in volume 39 addressed the cultivation of application ability in a modern design theory and method course, showing the journal serving engineering pedagogy as well as teacher education.

Beyond education, the same volume 38 carried a legal study of juvenile community corrections in China from the perspective of restorative justice, including victims' participation in community corrections; an evaluation of the tourism development value of intangible cultural heritage taking Yuncheng City as its case; an assessment of the tourism experience at Yuncheng Museum using the ASEB method; a comparative study of the English translation of corporate publicity webpages; and research on the competitiveness of Shanxi Province's logistics industry. Earlier, in 2019, volume 37 carried further logistics research on the province. Taken together, these citations show a journal that publishes law, economics and management, tourism, translation studies and education side by side — exactly the profile of a comprehensive university's house journal.

The journal and local research

The Yuncheng Museum study and the intangible-heritage tourism study deserve particular attention, because they show the journal performing the function that most distinguishes China's local university journals: documenting and analysing the home region with scholarly method. Yuncheng's salt lake, its Guandi culture, its museums and its heritage tourism are subjects on which the local university holds a natural advantage of access and knowledge, and research published in its journal feeds directly into how the city understands and presents its own assets. The logistics studies of Shanxi Province perform the same service for the regional economy, examining the competitiveness of an inland province's distribution industries from inside that province.

This local grounding does not make the journal parochial. The juvenile corrections study addressed a national legal question, the blended-learning studies addressed teaching problems shared by universities across China, and the translation study addressed a problem faced by Chinese enterprises nationwide. The pattern is the classic one for such journals: national questions examined by scholars who also carry a distinctive regional brief.

Place in Chinese academic publishing

The Journal of Yuncheng University belongs to the large family of Chinese university journals — the xuebao — through which provincial universities publish the research of their own staff and of scholars elsewhere in China. Its DOI pattern, with the journal's CN number embedded in each article identifier, places it within the standard Chinese system in which articles are cited in the form exemplified by the restorative justice article: Journal of Yuncheng University, 38(4), 53–58, DOI 10.15967/j.cnki.cn14-1316/g4.2020.04.010. That such citations appear in international scholarship — in criminology bibliographies, in education research published in the Philippines, in conference proceedings on mobile learning — shows the journal circulating beyond its home province through the normal channels of Chinese academic indexing and citation.

For readers outside China, the journal is best approached as a source on its region and on Chinese higher-education practice. Its education articles record, from inside a provincial university, how blended learning, mobile learning and curriculum reform were actually being implemented in Chinese classrooms in the early 2020s; its tourism and heritage articles record how a historic salt city was evaluating its cultural assets; and its law and logistics articles record provincial scholarly engagement with national policy questions.

Continuity and development

The journal's continuity from at least volume 27 in 2009 through volume 39 in 2021, under a numbering sequence that implies a considerably earlier start, parallels the continuity of its university since 1978. Both institution and journal survived the mergers of 1989 and the upgrade of 2002 without breaking their record, and the journal's subject matter broadened as the university broadened from teacher training into a ten-discipline comprehensive institution. Studies of the university's own teachers, published in the journal as early as 2009, show it serving from the start as a venue for reflective scholarship on the institution's own educational mission.

Why the journal matters

The Journal of Yuncheng University matters on three levels. For its university, it is the principal collected record of scholarly work across 51 undergraduate majors and ten disciplines. For its city and region, it is a scholarly forum in which Hedong's salt history, Guandi culture, museum practice and heritage tourism, and southern Shanxi's economic questions, receive sustained analytical attention. And for the wider scholarly world, its citable, DOI-bearing articles — on restorative justice, on blended and mobile learning, on heritage tourism evaluation — provide documented Chinese evidence on questions of general interest, produced from a university rooted in one of the earliest cradles of Chinese civilisation.