Fifty Years of Modern China: An International Journal of History and Social Science

Abstract

Looking back at the past half-century since the founding of the journal Modern China in 1975, we can see that in the beginning non–Chinese American scholars accounted for fully 73 percent of all articles. That figure remained at a fairly high 64 percent at the end of the century, but has declined greatly since, first down to 26 percent by 2005-2009, and further to just 11 percent in 2020-2022. That decline has been partly countered by the increasing numbers of Chinese-origin scholars (US citizens or not) based in the United States. At the same time, the proportion of articles published by mainland China–based scholars has steadily increased in the past two decades, reaching the present 28 percent. If we add to that articles by Chinese-origin scholars both inside and outside the United States, citizens or not, the total proportion rises to 65 percent, nearly two-thirds of all our articles, a sea change for the journal. Alongside that change, there has been the rise and expansion also of non–Chinese-origin scholars in the rest of the English–language world outside the United States, who now account for 24 percent of all our articles. Together these changes tell about the dramatic transnationalization of English language–based China studies as a whole, from mainly non–Chinese-origin American scholars to an ever-increasing proportion of Chinese-origin scholars, and from mainly a US endeavor to an ever more transnational one.