Promoting More High Quality Chinese Studies of China and Their Translation into English Is a Matter of Great Urgency!

Abstract Because the present-day Chinese academic system gives little value to monographic studies, and non-Chinese scholars are very, very rarely able to compose in Chinese, Chinese studies today severely lacks high quality monographic research in Chinese. At the same time, most Chinese scholars in China (distinguished from Chinese-origin scholars abroad) are generally only able to translate from English into their mother tongue Chinese, and seldom able to do the reverse of translating into their non-mother tongue English. As a result, quality English-language studies by mainland Chinese scholars are also rare. On a global level, therefore, high quality book-length scholarship on China is in fact largely limited to English language studies by non-Chinese foreign scholars and overseas Chinese scholars, and is severely lacking in studies by mainland Chinese scholars, whether in Chinese or English. This is a situation that cries out urgently for change.