Chinese Studies Vol. 44, No. 3 (September, 2026)
Introduction
Chinese Studies is the official publication of the Center for Chinese Studies (CCS). It was launched in July 1983 as a biannual journal with a broad emphasis on Chinese studies, featuring scholarly articles, research notes, and book reviews in both Chinese and English. Since 2008, it has been published quarterly in March, June, September, and December every year.
Chinese Studies welcomes submissions from scholars in related fields including, but not limited to, history, literature, philology, philosophy, and cultural studies. As a highly acclaimed peer-reviewed scholarly journal in the international community of Sinology, it has been ranked at the top tier of the Taiwan Humanities Citation Index (THCI CORE).
An editorial board was established in 1997. Board members are renowned scholars selected from a range of fields: history, literature, philosophy, and linguistics. They hold board meetings four times a year. To maintain the leading role in Chinese studies and to invigorate scholarly inquiries, the editorial board organizes a special issue each year to bring together focused discussions on a topic that reflects the current state of the field in Chinese studies research.
To promote open access to journal articles and to facilitate research, Chinese Studies offers free access to all its articles in many full-text databases, such as EBSCO: History Abstracts with Full Text, CEPS, TJFD, HyRead, and CLISA. All articles can also be accessed in the Full Text Database of CCS Publications for free searching, downloading, and printing.
*To submit, please email your article to chinesestudies@ncl.edu.tw or mail it to Chinese Studies, Editorial Office, 20 Zhongshan S. Road, Taipei 100201, Taiwan (R.O.C.).
The March 2028 issue of Chinese Studies will be a special issue entitled “Diachronic Studies of the Grammar of Chinese and Chinese Dialects,” guest-edited by Research Fellow Wu Rui-wen 吳瑞文 at the Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica. Papers may be submitted in either Chinese or English and should respectively be 30,000 characters or 10,000 words or less (including footnotes). Form and style should follow the “Guide for Submissions to Chinese Studies” and the “Chinese Studies Stylesheet.”
The use of language has long been regarded as the factor that distinguishes humans from other animals, as well as being a mental activity unique to human beings. As an object, language is incessantly evolving, with grammar being no exception. One advantage of researching the Chinese language is its unbroken record of written texts spanning three to four millennia. On the surface, both ancient and modern Chinese use Chinese characters as the medium of communication; but in terms of grammar, significant differences exist, exemplified by lexical turnover, grammatical shifts, the emergence and cessation of certain grammatical functions, and taxonomical evolutions. For modern Chinese, aside from Mandarin being the standardized form, other dialects have also retained traces of its ancient counterpart: “When rituals are lost, seek them in the wilderness.” The historical grammar of dialects thus serves as a window into the transformations of Chinese grammar. Diachronic studies of Chinese grammar should then employ methodologies that combine longitudinal analyses of historical texts with modern Chinese and its dialects, thereby deriving general principles of grammatical shifts. Such research directions not only further our understanding of the Chinese language itself, but position the field as a reference for related studies of other languages.
Based on the above, the “Diachronic Studies of the Grammar of Chinese and Chinese Dialects” special issue, with a focus on the “longitudinal developments from ancient to modern Chinese,” aims to provide a platform for scholars in related fields to showcase the broad and diverse dimensions of research in the history of Chinese grammar.
The deadline for submissions to this issue is February 28, 2027
Please send submissions to us by e-mail at chinesestudies@ncl.edu.tw
