Scholarly Communication at the Crossroads in China by Jingfeng Xia (review)

China has received more than a passing acknowledgement in recent volumes of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing—a situation that had escaped my notice until recently. In fact, as a single-country focus, China has garnered the most attention of late,¹ a point that should please Jingfeng Xia, dean of the library and university collections at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania and author of Scholarly Communication at the Crossroads in China. After all, as Xia points out, China now annually produces the largest number of doctoral recipients worldwide, applies for the most patents, spends the second-highest amount in research and development (after the United States), and submits and publishes the second-largest number of scholarly articles (again, after the United States). Vast is the landscape for scholarly publishing in China, and Xia presents the promise and potential for even greater contributions to knowledge.

But with unprecedented growth come challenges, and one accomplishment of Xia's book is to contextualize the present scholarly climate in China. Xia defines scholarly communication broadly, portraying it as a process that begins with the education of scholars; continues with the production and dissemination of scholarship; and includes the acquisition, preservation, and evaluation of scholarly outputs. Bookended by a brief introduction and conclusion, Xia's six core chapters (averaging twenty-five pages) consider both the historical and contemporary scenes in China, focusing on the dramatic organizational and policy changes since the 1970s affecting higher education, scholarship and publishing, archival practices, libraries and Internet use, international collaborations, and bibliometrics. Xia neither shies away from nor apologizes for embarrassments. Rather, he seeks to explain the challenges as opportunities, and the 'crossroads' in the title signifies Xia's uncertainty tinged with optimism for positive future developments in policy and practice.

In each chapter, Xia presents disparities qua 'dichotomies' exacerbated by unequal resource allocations in China's quest to demonstrate international intellectual prowess. In the first chapter, Xia introduces a rigidly stratified higher education system wherein the 'gap between affluences and poverties . . . is very visible' (28).² He explores the origins of the National College Entrance Examination (gaokao) in the civil service examination of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 ce), attributing to the gaokao the vibrant 'cram school' culture and subsequent expectation of competition and struggle within academia. Xia acknowledges unequal access for minority populations, rivalry among institutions of different ranks, and stress and tension among faculty, who face exacting performance-related measures for publishing in indexed journals (about which he offers more later).

Chapters 3 and 4 consider disparities in access to scholarship and challenges with its preservation. Here Xia holds no punches: he questions the abilities of librarians and archivists in China, suggesting nepotism in appointments. With language that may be harsher than intended—chapter 3 stands out as the roughest, with the most infelicities of English—he describes a 'large workforce of incompetents' who 'lack skills and knowledge' (77) and 'lack . . . professional standards' (97). Denouncing them further, he writes that 'they do not seem to have the capability and desire to learn new technologies' (83) and that 'libraries and archives are considered to be places for people to lie down on the job' (86). Moreover, the evaluation of quantity over quality for promotion and tenure in library science 'has brought in tremendous lemon articles and low-quality journals useless to the profession' (74).³Despite—or perhaps because of—these workforce assessments, chapters three and four may be of greatest interest to librarians and archivists; they serve well to position this book in Chandos's Information Professional series.

The remaining chapters speak directly to scholarly publishing in China; I found them all to be illuminating. In chapter 2, Xia remarks that the general public apathy toward academic misconduct in China—plagiarism, data falsification, excessive self-citation—'has really damaged [End Page 478...