About The China Review

The China Review

The China Review is an interdisciplinary English-language academic journal on Greater China published by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press in Hong Kong. Its full descriptive title presents it as an interdisciplinary journal on Greater China, and its publisher describes it as a multidisciplinary journal on China studies. It covers Greater China and its people across domestic politics and international relations, society, business and economic development, modern history, the arts and cultural studies. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press describes it as the only Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)-indexed area-studies journal in Hong Kong, a status it has held since its inclusion in the SSCI in 2007, and more recently as the only China-based English journal devoted to the study of Greater China and its people. Its International Standard Serial Number is ISSN 1680-2012.

The journal occupies a particular place in Hong Kong publishing. Hong Kong has long served as a meeting point between scholarship produced inside China and scholarship produced about China elsewhere, and a Hong Kong university press journal publishing in English was well placed to address both audiences. The China Review was built to do exactly that: to publish research on modern and contemporary China that could be read by specialists in different disciplines, rather than confining itself to a single field such as political science, history or economics alone.

Origins as the annual China Review

The China Review is a continuation of China Review, an annual publication of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. The publisher dates that annual publication to 1991 in its journal description, while another publisher page says the journal has been published by the press since 1990, reflecting the 1990-91 origin of the annual series given in reference descriptions of the title. The Chinese University of Hong Kong states that the journal was founded in 1991 by Professor Wang Shaoguang. Wang remains identified on the journal's masthead as its founding editor, with an affiliation to Tsinghua University.

The annual origin matters to the journal's character. An annual review volume is typically a stock-taking publication, gathering assessments of developments across a field over a period. When that annual was converted into a regular journal, it retained a breadth of coverage that narrower disciplinary journals do not usually attempt. The change therefore explains why The China Review continues to publish not only original research articles but also state-of-the-field reviews, research notes, book reviews and book review essays, and why its editors actively invite scholars to organise special issues on important topics.

From twice-yearly journal to quarterly

In 2001 the publication became a twice-yearly journal. The publisher records that it published twice a year, in April and October, from 2001. That schedule continued until the journal expanded again in 2018, when it moved to four issues a year. Since that change it has appeared quarterly, with issues in February, May, August and November. Project MUSE, one of the platforms through which the journal is distributed, likewise describes it as published four issues per year in those months by The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press.

The move to quarterly publication was a significant step for an area-studies journal. Increasing frequency requires a larger and steadier flow of publishable research, a wider pool of reviewers and contributors, and an editorial operation able to handle special issues alongside regular submissions. The 2018 expansion therefore marked the point at which The China Review settled into the rhythm of a mainstream international social-science quarterly, while keeping the broad Greater China remit it had inherited from the annual.

Scope: Greater China across the disciplines

The journal's stated coverage is Greater China and its people. In the publisher's formulation, the disciplines covered are domestic politics and international relations; society; business and economic development; modern history; and the arts and cultural studies. Its call for papers invites high-quality research articles, research notes and book reviews dealing with the political, economic and social aspects of modern and contemporary China.

That combination defines an area-studies journal rather than a disciplinary one. A single issue may therefore place work on Chinese domestic politics alongside work on business, society or culture, on the premise that developments in Greater China cannot be understood from one disciplinary angle alone. The Greater China framing is also broader than a focus on the mainland state alone: it encompasses the people and societies of the wider Chinese world as the journal defines its subject, which is why history, the arts and cultural studies sit alongside politics and economics in the same title.

Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press

The publisher is The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, the publishing arm of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shatin, Hong Kong. The press is the institutional home of the journal, provides its editor, and handles submissions through the journal's editorial address at the university. Publishing the journal from Hong Kong gives it a base that is geographically and academically inside Greater China while operating in the English-language international journal system of indexing services, university-press distribution and digital platforms.

That base also explains the journal's participation in schemes run through American university-press infrastructure. Project MUSE is a collaboration associated with Johns Hopkins University Press and hosts journals and books from many university presses. In 2025 The China Review was selected for Project MUSE's Subscribe to Open programme, under which, the university reported, CUHK Press was the only Asian publisher among the presses in the programme's initial stage.

Editorial leadership

The founding editor is Wang Shaoguang, identified by the university as the professor who founded the journal in 1991 and listed by Project MUSE and the publisher as founding editor. Wang's name has remained on the masthead in that founding role even as day-to-day editorship passed to the press. The current editor, as listed by the publisher and by Project MUSE, is Yuan Zaijun of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press. The journal is therefore edited from within its publishing house, under the authority of a named founding editor drawn from the academic China-studies community.

Alongside the editor, the journal maintains an editorial board, listed in its Project MUSE front matter, and it works with guest editors for special issues. Scholars at the forefront of their China-studies communities are encouraged to organise, guest edit and submit special issues, but they must first send a proposal to the editorial team clarifying the topic, the significance of the research, the abstract and outline of each article, contributors' short biographies and an estimated timetable, for review and approval before manuscripts are submitted. That procedure keeps special issues under the journal's own editorial control.

What the journal publishes

The China Review publishes research articles, state-of-the-field reviews, research notes, book reviews and book review essays. It also publishes special issues, which may contain four or five articles researching a topic from various perspectives and making new or unique contributions to the discourse in their field. The mix is deliberate: research articles present original findings, state-of-the-field reviews take stock of a subject for readers outside a specialism, research notes allow shorter interventions, and the reviews and review essays track the books through which China studies is argued out.

The publisher gives concrete limits for contributors. Research article manuscripts should not be longer than 10,000 words. Research notes should normally be 3,000 words, and book reviews between 800 and 1,000 words. Submissions are made in electronic format, double-spaced, with footnotes grouped together at the end of the paper, and the style of text and footnotes should conform to The Chicago Manual of Style. Those details place the journal squarely in the conventions of English-language humanities and social-science publishing.

Indexing, the SSCI and standing

The China Review has been included in the Social Sciences Citation Index since 2007. Its publisher calls it the only SSCI-indexed area-studies journal in Hong Kong. Project MUSE's front matter lists a wider set of indexing and abstracting services: the SSCI, Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences, Elsevier bibliographic databases, Current Geographical Publications, International Political Science Abstracts, Journal of Economic Literature, MLA International Bibliography, Bibliography of Asian Studies, Social Scisearch and Entrepreneurship Research Engine.

The publisher also reported journal impact factors of 0.906 in 2017 and 0.694 in 2018. More recently, reporting the journal's selection for equitable open access in 2025, The Chinese University of Hong Kong described The China Review as currently ranked in the SSCI's top quartile, Q1. Taken together, the long SSCI inclusion, the breadth of abstracting services and the reported Q1 ranking explain why the publisher presents the title as Hong Kong's flagship English-language area-studies journal rather than as a purely local university publication.

Access through JSTOR, Project MUSE and ProQuest

The journal's contents can be accessed through ProQuest Asia Business and Reference, Project MUSE and JSTOR, as well as through the publisher. Those platforms are the normal route by which university libraries around the world give their readers access to the journal, and they put a Hong Kong-published title onto the same digital shelves as the journals of American and European university presses.

Access changed materially in 2025. The publisher announced that since 2025, all new content of The China Review has been open access immediately upon publication through the Project MUSE Subscribe to Open Program. The Chinese University of Hong Kong explained that Subscribe to Open is an open-access model that enables academic journals to be freely accessible to the public without charging authors article processing fees, and that since February 2025 the journal has been available for full-text open access on that platform. For readers without a subscribing library, that change removed the paywall from new issues while keeping the journal's existing editorial and publishing structure intact.

A bridge between academic communities

The Chinese University of Hong Kong has described the journal's aim as bridging the academic communities of the West and the Greater China region. That aim follows naturally from its history and location: an English-language journal, edited in Hong Kong, published by a Chinese university press, indexed in the main Western citation systems and now openly accessible through an American university-press platform. Scholars in Greater China can use it to reach an international readership, and scholars elsewhere can use it both as a source on Greater China and as a venue read inside the region.

The China Review thus stands as one of the clearest examples of Hong Kong's role in China studies publishing. From an annual review begun at the start of the 1990s, through its conversion into a twice-yearly journal in 2001 and its expansion to a quarterly in 2018, to SSCI inclusion since 2007 and open access for new content from 2025, it has developed in step with the internationalisation of research on Greater China — while remaining, throughout, a journal published in Hong Kong about Greater China and its people.