academic e-journals

The late 1990s saw the rapid growth of electronic Chinese-language journals that published articles on a diverse range of issues in the social sciences and humanities. China News Digest (Huaxia wenzhai) was one of the earliest (US-based) Chinese e-journals to feature several scholarly essays among those on popular topics that it normally carried. Since 2000, PRC-based academic e-journals have become highly significant in the Chinese intellectual world.

In that year alone, websites like Century China (Shiji Zhongguo), The Realm of Ideas (Sixiang de jingjie), Cultural China (Wenhua Zhongguo) and Critical Inquiry (Sixiang pinglun) provided an increasingly global Chinese-language readership with unprecedentedly up-to-the-minute information and commentary on topics of both scholarly and public interest.

Unlike academic e-journals in the English language which largely adhere to the format of their print versions, Chinese-language e-journals, like the influential Century China, feature both academic articles and informal ‘discussions’ on topical issues and current affairs. These ‘discussions’ may include one-sentence opinions, pithy commentaries or lengthy excurses by both known and pseudonymous authors. The immediacy of cyber-publication and its relative freedom from official censorship, coupled with the willingness of most Chinese e-journal editorial boards to accommodate different views and to accept pseudonymous submissions, have led many Chinese intellectuals to celebrate the dawning of a virtual public sphere in the Chinese-speaking world. Critics of the vitriolic exchanges that have appeared in these e-journals, such as the controversy surrounding the ‘Cheung Kong—Reading Awards’(Changjiang Dushu jiang) in 2000, fear that the relative ease of cyber-publication may also undermine intellectual responsibility and academic professionalism.

GLORIA DAVIES