About Journal of Zhengzhou University of Light Technology

Journal of Zhengzhou University of Light Technology

The Journal of Zhengzhou University of Light Technology, in Chinese Zhengzhou Qinggong Daxue Xuebao, is the Chinese-language academic journal of the university in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, whose English name is rendered both as Zhengzhou University of Light Technology and, in most of the university's own English material, as Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (ZZULI). Founded in 1977 as Zhengzhou Institute of Light Industry, the host is Henan's light-industry university: an engineering-led institution built originally for the food, tobacco and consumer-goods industries, now a multi-disciplinary university of more than twenty-two thousand students, co-built by the Henan provincial government and the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration. Its journal publishes that university's scholarship, centred on food and tobacco science, electrical engineering and industrial design. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and no ISSN or CN number is therefore stated here.

Identity, names and a necessary distinction

The naming history matters more for this journal than for most, because the host has changed both its Chinese and its English names. The institution was founded in 1977 as Zhengzhou Institute of Light Industry. It was renamed Zhengzhou University of Light Industry in 2011, when it moved from institute — xueyuan — to university standing in its English rendering, and its current English name, Zhengzhou University of Light Technology, dates from 2018: the Chinese name changed in December 2018, with Ministry of Education approval, from Zhengzhou Light Industry College in Chinese to Zhengzhou University of Light Technology in Chinese, while a great deal of English-language material, including the university's own website domain, zzuli.edu.cn, continues to use “Light Industry” and the abbreviation ZZULI. The journal follows the host's current name, and it must not be duplicated under its former Light Industry titles, which are earlier names of the same title, not separate journals. A second distinction is equally important: this university is not Zhengzhou University, the large comprehensive university also in Zhengzhou. The Journal of Zhengzhou University (Engineering Science) — ISSN 1671-6833, CN 41-1339/T, founded in 1980 — belongs to Zhengzhou University, a different institution, and its serial numbers must never be attached to this journal.

The host: a light-industry institute founded in 1977

The university's own history, repeated consistently across its profiles, begins in 1977. Zhengzhou Institute of Light Industry was administered successively by the Ministry of Light Industry, the National Council of Light Industry and the State Economic and Trade Commission — the central bodies responsible for China's consumer-goods industries — until 1998, when it was transferred to Henan Province as an institution co-administered by central and local authorities. That administrative descent explains its character: it was a national light-industry ministry's college planted in the capital of China's most populous agricultural province, created to train engineers for food processing, tobacco, fermentation, daily-use chemicals, electrical appliances and the other trades gathered under the Chinese term qinggong, light industry. In 2009 it was listed among Henan's projected doctoral-degree awarding units, and in 2018 it was confirmed as a Henan key construction unit for doctoral authorisation; the December 2018 renaming to a university of light technology marked the completion of that climb. The Chinese graduate admissions service summarises the result: after more than forty years the school had become an engineering-led, multi-disciplinary undergraduate university, a Henan key construction university, a university co-built by the Henan Provincial People's Government and the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration, and one of Henan's characteristic backbone universities. Its motto, “wei zhi ze yi, bu wei ze nan” — in effect, doing it makes it easy; not doing it makes it hard — is carried in its official profiles.

Disciplines: food, tobacco and the light industries

The university has evolved, in its own formula, into a multi-disciplinary, engineering-focused university promoting the coordinated development of science, liberal arts, economics, management, law, pedagogy and art alongside engineering. Its scale is substantial: profiles record 67 undergraduate majors, more than 22,000 full-time students — one reference count gives 23,000 students and about 1,700 administrative staff, and an older faculty account gives nearly 900 faculty of whom over 400 were professors or associate professors — and a postgraduate structure of fourteen or fifteen first-level master's authorisation points, with professional degree categories besides. Its dominant and characteristic subject group, in Henan's official designation, is Food Science and Engineering, and its traditional strong disciplines are chemical engineering and technology, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and design, supported by seventeen provincial key disciplines in one count and twenty-two in another, three provincial key laboratories and more than twenty research institutes, including a provincial bioengineering and technology centre. Its school structure makes the light-industry identity concrete: a School of Food and Bioengineering, a School of Tobacco Science and Engineering, colleges of electrical and information engineering, mechanical and electrical engineering, materials and chemical engineering, computer and communication engineering, economics and management, foreign languages, politics and law, mathematics and information science, and schools for art and design and software engineering. Few Chinese universities keep a whole school for tobacco science; Zhengzhou's does, and it shapes the journal accordingly.

Scope of the journal

The journal's scope, as recorded for this title, centres on three fields: food and tobacco science, electrical engineering, and industrial design. Each corresponds to a documented strength of the host. Food science is the university's designated dominant subject group, taught in its School of Food and Bioengineering in a province that is one of China's principal food-processing bases. Tobacco science reflects both the dedicated school and the university's co-building relationship with the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration and its strategic alliances with domestic tobacco companies; Henan is a major tobacco-growing and cigarette-manufacturing province, and the university's research serves that industry directly. Electrical engineering is one of its four named traditional strong disciplines, and industrial design grows out of its design discipline and its art and design provision — the field that connects an engineering university to the consumer products its light industries make. Around that core, the journal carries the general scholarship of an engineering-led university: chemical and materials engineering, mechanical engineering, computer and communication engineering, and the economics, management, law and humanities work of its other schools. No separate column list for this title was attested in the sources consulted, so the scope is stated here at the level of the host's attested disciplines and the journal's recorded centres of gravity, not as a list of named columns.

The university's two periodicals in its own account

The university's own introduction gives a useful, dated picture of its publishing standing. It records that its staff had published more than two thousand natural-science papers collected by SCI, EI and ISTP and more than five hundred monographs and textbooks, and it names two periodicals with their standings. The Journal of Light Industry — the university's natural-science journal in Chinese, Qinggong Xuebao — is described there as a core journal of Chinese science and technology and an excellent scientific journal of Chinese universities. The Journal of Zhengzhou University of Light Industry (Social Science Edition) is described as a national excellent social-science journal, a first-class journal of Henan Province and one of Henan's top twenty journals. Those descriptions belong to the university's profile as published in the late 2010s, under the Light Industry name; the titles have followed the host through its 2018 renaming, and the present directory title, Journal of Zhengzhou University of Light Technology, is the current form of this same university-journal line. Readers should treat the two named periodicals as the natural-science and social-science faces of the host's journal publishing, and this profile's title as the umbrella university journal under its current name — not as three competing journals from three different institutions.

Open access at the Journal of Light Industry

The natural-science journal in the university's stable has a documented modern publishing policy. Its official website states that the Journal of Light Industry is an open access journal: since 2021 it has adopted an open access publishing model using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 licence, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, under which articles are immediately and permanently available free on the journal's official website upon publication. Articles published between 2011 and 2020 were also flipped to open access and are accessible free through the same website. Articles published before 2011 are not open access: their copyright belongs to the journal's editorial department, and users access them through China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) or other platforms on a paid basis. Authors publishing in the journal sign a copyright transfer agreement covering compilation, distribution, reproduction, translation and information-network dissemination rights, transferred worldwide to the editorial department as publisher. That combination — a decade of back file retrospectively opened, current volumes open from publication, and the pre-2011 file left on CNKI — is the practical access position for a reader approaching this university's journal literature today, and it is stated on the journal site itself rather than inferred.

Industry partnerships and regional role

The university's research is unusually tightly bound to named industries, and the journal's applied character follows from those bonds. Its profiles record collaborative-innovation agreements with the cities of Zhengzhou, Xuchang and Jiyuan, strategic alliances with a number of domestic tobacco companies, and long-term industry-university-research cooperation with large enterprises in light industry and related fields — the food companies Sanquan and Shuanghui among them, home-appliance makers such as Midea and Haier, and machinery and vehicle firms such as Yutong Bus and CITIC Heavy Industry; older profiles add the Hongta tobacco group and the Shenma group. The university states that it has assumed about two thousand major scientific research projects, including projects of the National Natural Science Foundation and the National Social Science Foundation, and has won more than fifty research awards at provincial level or above, including a second prize in the National Scientific and Technological Progress awards, with two Henan provincial scientific research innovation teams and one Henan university innovation team. Zhengzhou itself — a Yellow River city, capital of Henan, an ancient Shang-dynasty capital site and one of China's great railway junctions, where the Beijing-Guangzhou and Lanzhou-Lianyungang lines cross — gives the university a central-China service territory that matches its industry links. A journal published from this base can be expected to carry applied food, tobacco, electrical and design research written for the industries at its door.

How to read and use this journal

For a directory reader, the practical points are these. The title is the Journal of Zhengzhou University of Light Technology (Zhengzhou Qinggong Daxue Xuebao), published in Chinese by the university in Zhengzhou, Henan, founded in 1977 as Zhengzhou Institute of Light Industry, renamed Zhengzhou University of Light Industry in 2011 and given its current name in 2018 — with the caution that the university's English material still widely uses “Zhengzhou University of Light Industry” and the abbreviation ZZULI. Its journal literature appears in natural-science and social-science forms, of which the natural-science Journal of Light Industry is a Chinese science-and-technology core journal, open access since 2021, and the social-science edition has been described by the university as a national excellent social-science journal and a first-class Henan journal. Its scope centres on food and tobacco science, electrical engineering and industrial design within an engineering-led, multi-disciplinary university co-built by Henan Province and the State Tobacco Monopoly Administration. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is invented here; in particular, the ISSN of the separate Zhengzhou University's engineering journal belongs to a different institution and a different title.