About Tsinghua Journal of Education

Tsinghua Journal of Education

Tsinghua Journal of Education is a Chinese-language journal of education published bimonthly in Beijing by the Institute of Education of Tsinghua University. Its Chinese title is 清华教育研究 (Qinghua Jiaoyu Yanjiu). It was established in 1980, initially under the name Education Research Communication, and was renamed Tsinghua Journal of Education in 1986; by 2020 it had published 166 issues. It is a CSSCI source journal covering higher education, education theory, education history and comparative education.

The journal is one of the fixtures of Chinese education research: a bimonthly from the education institute of one of China's two most prestigious universities, with a run of more than four decades that begins in the same reform-era moment as the institute that publishes it.

Established in 1980, renamed in 1986

The Institute of Education's own account, given on Tsinghua's website, records the journal's history in a sentence: established in 1980, the Tsinghua Journal of Education was initially named Education Research Communication and was renamed Tsinghua Journal of Education in 1986; a total of 166 issues had been published by the time of that account in 2020.

Each element of that sentence is informative. The 1980 founding places the journal in the first wave of post-1978 scholarly reconstruction, when Chinese universities were rebuilding disciplines and founding the journals to carry them. The original name — a "communication" of education research — reflects the modest bulletin form in which many Chinese journals of that moment began. The 1986 renaming marks its maturation into a full journal under the university's name. And the count of 166 issues by 2020 gives its scale: a continuous, substantial run across four decades.

The publishing institute

The journal is published by the Institute of Education of Tsinghua University, founded in 1979 — one year before the journal — and described by the university as one of the earliest institutions in China authorised to grant master's and doctoral degrees in education. The institute (now the university's School of Education) declares its commitment to involving students with leading thinkers, researchers and practitioners in education, connecting them with cutting-edge research and the best policies and practices.

Institute and journal thus grew together: the institute created in 1979 founded its journal in 1980, and the two have carried Tsinghua's education research ever since. The institute's faculty — including its professor and executive dean Jinghuan Shi, a leading scholar of higher education and comparative education, and colleagues who host visiting scholars from the world's major centres of higher-education research — forms the journal's editorial community and much of its authorship.

Scope: higher education at the centre

The journal covers higher education, education theory, education history and comparative education. Higher education is its centre of gravity, reflecting Tsinghua's own position: a world-class research university studying the institution it exemplifies. Its pages have carried, for example, former president Gu Binglin's programmatic addresses on innovation and the research university, analyses of the state and problems of strategy control in Chinese research universities, and — in a sign of its comparative range — a full scholarly treatment of the California Master Plan for higher education and its implications for China, prepared by the Oxford and Melbourne scholar Simon Marginson from a lecture given at the institute in 2016 and published in the journal in 2017.

That example captures the journal's method: Chinese higher education examined through its own leading institution's experience, through national policy analysis, and through systematic comparison with the world's other great systems. Education theory and history supply the reflective frame; comparative education supplies the mirror.

CSSCI standing

The journal is a source journal of the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI), the selective index maintained by Nanjing University that designates China's leading humanities and social-science journals. In education — a discipline with a large journal population — CSSCI membership places Tsinghua Journal of Education among the recognised national titles, the journals that define the field's research front and that count in the evaluation of scholars' work.

Its standing is reinforced by company: bibliometric and review literature on Chinese education research routinely draws on the journal's contents as source material for the field's development — studies of innovation education, of the history of Chinese education study across forty years of reform, and of higher education's transformation cite the journal as one of the discipline's core periodicals. A journal used that way is functioning as infrastructure for its field's self-knowledge.

Bimonthly publication

The journal is published bimonthly — six issues a year — in Beijing, in Chinese. Six issues annually across more than forty years is the arithmetic behind the institute's reported count of 166 issues by 2020 (the count reflecting the journal's earlier frequencies as well as its bimonthly maturity), and it gives the journal the capacity to sustain both breadth and timeliness: special themes and forums alongside regular research articles, addresses and lectures alongside empirical studies.

Its form follows the conventions of Chinese university journals: articles with Chinese and English titles and abstracts, distributed through the national academic database system through which CSSCI journals circulate, and cited by the short form of its Chinese title across the education literature.

The journal and Tsinghua's self-study

A distinctive function of the journal is institutional self-knowledge. Tsinghua's presidents and education scholars have used its pages to reflect on the university itself — on innovation as the way of the research university, on strategy in Chinese research universities, on the civic education centres and institutional histories of higher education abroad and at home. The journal's 2017 issue carried, for instance, a historical study of America's Center for Civic Education and its transformation into a national think tank — comparative institutional history of exactly the kind a university studying its own future commissions.

That self-study sits within a wider Tsinghua commitment to education research: the university's Institute of Education hosts the International Journal of Chinese Education as its English-language venture, launched in cooperation with international publishers and supported under Tsinghua's strategy for heightening the arts, humanities and social sciences. The Chinese journal remains the senior title — the one founded in 1980, through which the institute has always addressed the Chinese field.

Authors and readership

The journal's authors include Tsinghua's own education faculty, scholars from universities across China, and international contributors whose work bears on Chinese education — visiting lecturers at the institute among them. Its readership is the Chinese education research community: professors and doctoral candidates in education, higher-education administrators who follow research on their own sector, and policymakers in a ministry-directed education system.

Because its home institute grants education doctorates and its pages carry the field's leading Chinese work on higher education, the journal functions as a training text as well as a research venue: generations of Chinese education scholars have learned the discipline's questions partly from its issues.

Identification and distinctions

The journal is identified by its Chinese title 清华教育研究, its publisher the Institute of Education (School of Education) of Tsinghua University, its Beijing base, its 1980 founding as Education Research Communication and its 1986 renaming. It should be distinguished from Tsinghua's other journals — including the university's comprehensive philosophy and social sciences journal and the institute's English-language International Journal of Chinese Education — and from Peking University's education review, its natural counterpart across the city: the two journals are the education titles of China's two most prestigious universities, and are frequently read and cited together.

Place in Chinese education scholarship

Tsinghua Journal of Education holds the position its facts describe: a CSSCI source journal, bimonthly, published since 1980 by the education institute of Tsinghua University, centred on higher education and ranging across education theory, history and comparative study. Its 166 issues by 2020 constitute one of the substantial archives of Chinese education research.

Read across its run, the journal records how China's leading technical university came to study education itself — from a 1980 research communication in a rebuilding discipline, to the bimonthly forum in which Chinese and visiting scholars examine the future of the university. That is a history worth a directory entry, and the journal's own institute has conveniently written its first line: established 1980, renamed 1986, published ever since.