About Qiushi

Qiushi

Overview

Qiushi is the official theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, published in Beijing. Its name, written 求是 in Chinese and romanised as Qiúshì, literally means "Seeking Truth," and it is drawn from the phrase shishi qiushi — "seeking truth from facts" — a slogan closely associated with the pragmatic turn in Chinese politics under Deng Xiaoping, whose handwriting provided the calligraphy for the journal's title. The journal's first issue appeared on 1 July 1988, succeeding the Party's earlier theoretical journal Red Flag, which had ceased publication the previous month. Qiushi is published by Qiushi Press, a deputy-ministerial-level institution, on behalf of the Central Committee and the Central Party School, and it appears twice a month. It publishes the speeches and signed articles of China's top leaders alongside theoretical and policy writing by senior officials, scholars and researchers, and it is regarded by scholars of Chinese politics as one of the most authoritative indicators of the Party's policy direction. An English-language edition was introduced in 2009, and the journal maintains a major online presence through its website, qstheory.cn.

Origins: The End of Red Flag

Qiushi was born from a deliberate break with the past. Its predecessor, Red Flag (Hongqi), had been the Chinese Communist Party's theoretical journal since 1958 and was one of the most prominent publications of the Mao era, closely associated with the ideological campaigns of the Cultural Revolution period. By the late 1980s, with China a decade into reform and opening up, the Party leadership sought to distance itself from the Cultural Revolution and its doctrinal style. Chinese officials announced in May 1988 that Red Flag would be closed, and its final issues appeared in June 1988. In its place, the Central Committee entrusted its Central Party School with publishing a new theoretical journal for the whole Party. The decision documents of the time, preserved in translations of the inaugural issue, set out the new journal's task: to conduct theoretical study on a Marxist basis in support of reform and opening to the outside world, and to address itself in the first instance to cadres. Qiushi was, in other words, designed from the start as a more reform-oriented voice for the Party than the journal it replaced.

The First Issue and the Meaning of the Name

The first issue of Qiushi appeared on 1 July 1988, a date of symbolic weight as the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The inaugural issue opened with the Central Committee's decision entrusting the Party School to publish the journal and an address to readers, and its contents showed the breadth the new title intended to cover: articles on reform of the political structure, on restructuring performing arts organisations, on Hong Kong's role in coastal economic development, on building the norms of a socialist commodity economy, and on philosophy and reform, among other topics. The name itself was a statement of method. "Seeking truth from facts" had been the watchword of the pragmatists who steered China away from ideological campaigns and towards experimentation judged by results, and Deng Xiaoping underlined the connection by handwriting the journal's title calligraphy himself. Where Red Flag's masthead had been in Mao Zedong's calligraphy, Qiushi's was in Deng's — a visual announcement, legible to every cadre who picked up the journal, that the Party's theoretical flagship now sailed under the banner of reform.

Publisher, Frequency and Headquarters

Qiushi is headquartered in Beijing and is published by Qiushi Press, which ranks as a deputy-ministerial-level institution — a status that signals how senior the journal sits within the Party-state structure. The journal is published on behalf of both the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Party School, the Party's principal institution for training senior cadres and developing its theory. It appears twice a month; sources describe its frequency variously as bimonthly, biweekly or semi-monthly, all referring to the same twice-monthly rhythm of numbered issues through the year — official reporting routinely refers, for example, to the 14th, 17th or 21st issue of a given year. The journal carries the International Standard Serial Number 1674-7569. Its Chinese-language website is at www.qstheory.cn, a domain name that itself emphasises the journal's theoretical mission. Few magazines anywhere are so directly wired into the centre of political power: Qiushi is not a journal about the Party leadership, but a journal of the Party leadership, issued by its central organs.

Content and Contributors

The defining feature of Qiushi's content is who writes it. According to the journal's English-language edition, about 60 per cent of the articles it publishes are written by Party and state leaders — including the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and senior officials at ministerial and provincial level — with the remainder contributed by scholars and researchers from China's think tanks and academic institutions. In practice, as analysts note, much of the writing published under leaders' names is produced with the help of their secretaries and drafting teams, as is standard for official texts of this kind. Each issue is led by the most important current statement of the leadership, and the journal serves as the canonical place of publication for major speeches and articles by the general secretary: an article by Xi Jinping in Qiushi is routinely announced in advance by state media as an event in its own right, with summaries carried across the Chinese press. For that reason, sinologists and China scholars treat the journal as an essential primary source — a collected record of the speeches and articles of the top leadership that indicates the general policy direction of the Party and attitudes within it on questions of national and international importance.

Qiushi in the Reform Era

Through its first two decades, Qiushi chronicled the theoretical work of a party remaking China's economy while retaining political control. Founded under General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, it was intended to signal and support the turn towards pragmatism, and it eclipsed its Maoist predecessor in importance as the Party's premier outlet for official positions on policy and ideology. The journal describes itself as the publication of the Party's central organs and an important ideological and theoretical position from which the Party Centre guides the work of the whole Party and the whole country. Its pages carried the successive theoretical formulations by which the leadership explained itself, and publication in Qiushi became the standard way to give a speech, a policy or an interpretation authoritative, citable form. Because it is a journal of record rather than of debate, analysts read it less for argument than for signals: the choice of lead article, the themes emphasised and the formulations used are all evidence of where the leadership's attention is directed.

Digital Editions and the English-Language Journal

Qiushi established its website on 1 July 2009, the journal's twenty-first anniversary, moving its content online in Chinese. Three months later, on 1 October 2009, an English-language edition of the journal was introduced, making selected content available to foreign readers in translation. The English edition developed substantially over the following decade: first launched as a quarterly in 2009, it underwent a complete redesign in 2020 and became a bimonthly publication. The English journal describes itself as the primary platform for disseminating the Party's theories to an international audience, and each of its issues features an important article by Xi Jinping originally published in the Chinese Qiushi, together with pieces analysing his articles and explaining his governance ideas and practices. Qiushi Press presents its print and digital operations as integrated, with an international platform anchored by the English edition of the journal, the English version of Qiushi Online, and the journal's social media presence. For overseas researchers, the English edition lowered the barrier to a source that had previously required reading Chinese or relying on monitoring translations.

Documented Moments in the Journal's History

Several individual episodes illustrate how Qiushi functions. In January 2015, the journal published an article by Xu Lan, an official from the publicity office of Ningbo in Zhejiang Province, criticising university professors for spreading Western values among Chinese youth — an article that drew international press attention as a sign of tightening ideological discipline in higher education. In February 2020, during the opening phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Qiushi documented an order concerning the outbreak that Xi Jinping had given on 7 January at a meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, a disclosure that was reported worldwide because it established the leadership's early knowledge of the crisis. Later that year, on 11 October 2020, the journal published Xi Jinping's article "Opening Up New Frontiers for Marxist Political Economy in Contemporary China," which cited the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty in support of China's socialist system on questions of income and wealth inequality. Each episode shows the journal's dual character: it is both a theoretical magazine and a bulletin board on which the leadership places facts and texts it wants on the authoritative record.

Qiushi Under Xi Jinping

Analysts who follow the journal closely argue that its character has sharpened under Xi Jinping. The Jamestown Foundation's China Brief, reviewing the journal in 2020, observed that each issue had become centred on a designated theme, opening with material devoted to the general secretary and his ideological formulations, and characterised the journal as increasingly a vehicle for promoting Xi's leadership — a marked change for a title founded, at least in intention, to supplant ideological rigidity with pragmatic flexibility. Other scholars, studying strategic narratives in Chinese official discourse under Xi, likewise mine Qiushi as primary evidence. Defenders and critics thus agree on the essential fact: the journal faithfully reflects the ideological line of the moment, which is precisely its function. Its authority is institutional rather than journalistic — when Qiushi speaks, it is the Central Committee speaking — and that is why its contents are monitored by governments, scholars and news organisations around the world.

External Scrutiny and Restrictions

The journal's official status has also made it an object of regulation abroad. In 2024, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council banned its citizens from working at Qiushi, citing national security concerns, and placed the journal on a list of mainland postings closed to Taiwanese employment. The episode is a small but telling measure of how the journal is perceived internationally: not as an ordinary magazine that happens to be published in Beijing, but as an organ of the Chinese Communist Party's central leadership whose staff are treated, for regulatory purposes, as working for the Party centre itself. Similar reasoning lies behind the attention paid to the journal by foreign China-watchers, for whom a new issue is a data point in tracking the leadership's priorities. Few theoretical journals anywhere attract that kind of geopolitical attention.

Significance and Legacy

Qiushi's place in Chinese media history is secure on several counts. It marks the institutional end of the Mao-era theoretical press: the closure of Red Flag in June 1988 and the appearance of Qiushi the following month form one of the clearest publishing symbols of China's reform turn, sealed by Deng Xiaoping's calligraphy on the new masthead. It has served for more than three decades as the premier outlet for the Communist Party's official positions, publishing the texts through which successive leaderships have explained themselves. And it has adapted, cautiously, to new conditions — launching a website in 2009, building an English edition from a quarterly into a bimonthly, and integrating its print and digital operations — without altering its essential nature. Published twice a month from Beijing by Qiushi Press for the Central Committee and the Central Party School, and read wherever the direction of Chinese policy matters, Qiushi remains what its founders made it in 1988: the seeking-truth journal in which the Chinese Communist Party states, on the record, what it thinks.