The word count should be comprised between 8800 and 9200 words (excluding abstract, keywords, the author’s biography, and acknowledgements). Given the large number of submissions China Perspectives receive, thank you for respecting this length).

The following guidelines are provided to help contributors in presenting and formatting original articles or translations for China Perspectives. Please follow these rules as closely as possible. In case of doubt, you may refer to the Chicago Manual of Style (please note that China Perspectives uses the author date system). In all cases, it is strongly advised to proofread your manuscript several times before submitting it, and to use word-processing tools to eliminate double spaces, etc.

For further information, please contact Constance Arhanchiague.

How to submit

I. Submission Criteria

1. China Perspectives is an anonymous peer-reviewed scholarly journal advised by an editorial board, published by the CEFC (French Centre for Research on Contemporary China). In accordance with the CEFC’s mission, it publishes articles relating to the contemporary political, economic, social, and cultural developments of the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, as well as Overseas Chinese communities.
2. After a first internal evaluation by the journal’s editorial committee, accepted articles will undertake a double anonymous peer-review made by specialists of the field that will determine its publication.
3. Articles should combine first-hand research with the theoretical perspective of social science, reflect the results of original research, and not have been previously published in any form.
4. Peer-reviewed research articles should be 9,000-word long (including: body of the text, tabs, footnotes, and final references; excluding: abstract, keywords, the author’s biography, and acknowledgements). Book reviews should be 1,000-word long, and review essays should be between 2,000- and 4,000-word long.
5. China Perspectives is a scientific journal published in English.
6. An author will be authorised to submit a second peer-reviewed article to China Perspectives only 18 months after the editorial committee accepts their first article. In case of rejection, the author cannot resubmit his article, even revised. He must respect a 12-month period before submitting a new article, unless otherwise specified by the editorial committee.
7. Copyright. By accepting the publication of their article in China Perspectives, the author agrees to grant exclusive copyright to the journal regarding this article. Copyright covers the manuscript, the pictures and all illustrations and additional material. Exclusive copyright is granted for both paper and electronic versions of the paper.

II. Evaluation Procedure

1. All submissions are first reviewed internally by the editors. If appropriate, they are then sent to two anonymous external reviewers for evaluation.
2. Please note that submitted manuscripts not in accordance with the following format guidelines will not be accepted for internal review.
3. Articles should be sent by e-mail to chinaperspectives@cefc.com.hk or through our online submission form (www.cefc.com.hk/china-perspectives/submissions/contacts), as an attachment in Word format (or RTF/ Rich Text Format).

Style Guide

I. Article Format

1. The text should be in Times New Roman 12 font, 1.5 line spacing, on A4 format pages in a Word format document.
2. The text should be preceded by

• a title in bold type (14);
• the author’s name and short biographical note (2-3 lines) containing the author’s position, institutional affiliation (and its full address), and email address;
• a 5 to 10-line abstract of the article;
• 5 to 10 keywords.

3. Bibliographic references. China Perspectives uses the Chicago-style Citation of citations (Author date), providing the main references relevant to the article in a final bibliography and other references in footnotes. The final references must correspond to the references in the body of the text. See IV. for more details.

II. Titles and subtitles

1. The title of the article should be succinct. It may be followed by an explanatory subtitle.
2. It is advisable to divide the article into subsections, using subtitles (do not number these). First-level sub-headings should appear in 14 font bold type, lower-case letters, and aligned on the left. If the text uses second-level subdivisions, they should appear in 12 font italics (non-bold).
3. Blank lines between paragraphs should be avoided, except before a sub-heading.
4. Authors should not use any type of automatic formatting, bullets, or multiple spaces for indenting.
5. Capitalisation in subtitles: Only the first word of each subtitle must be capitalised. Special case: if there is a colon ( : ) inside the subtitle, the following word must also be capitalised.

• Example: “Conclusion: Towards a Chinese jurisprudence ?”

III. Footnotes

1. All notes should be footnotes (not endnotes), and should appear in Times New Roman 10 font, with single spacing.
2. Note identifiers (superscripted numbers inserted in the main text) should follow all punctuation marks except dashes; in particular, they should appear after quotation marks and after final periods.
3. Footnotes should include pinyin and Chinese characters (which also appear in the body of the text).

Examples of footnotes references:

1. “Meet the 5 Female Activists China Has Detained,” The New York Times, 6 April 2015, https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20150406/c06womenprofiles/ (accessed on 25 September 2017).
2. Kris Cheng, “No Compensation for Hong Kong’s Ivory Traders Ahead of Total Ban, Says Environment Deputy,” Hong Kong Free Press, 6 September 2017, https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/09/06/no-compensation-hong-kongs-ivory-traders-ahead-total-ban-says-environment-deputy/ (accessed on 19 July 2018).
3. Poon Pak Lam 潘柏林, “港府擬立法5年後禁賣象牙” (Gang fu ni lifa wu nian hou jin mai xiangya, The Hong Kong Government Intends to Legislation the Banning of Ivory Trading Within Five Years), Apple Daily (蘋果日報), 22 December 2016, https://hk.news.appledaily.com/local/daily/article/20161222/19873400 (accessed on 24 July 2018).
4. The tension between formalist and anti-formalist arguments in Marxist legal thought is not, of course, limited to China (Stone 2002: 181; Zhang 2016; Liu 2018: 27).
5. See Zhang (2016, 2019).

IV. References

Academic references should appear in a separate bibliography at the end of the article. Mentions in the main text should appear in parentheses, following the Chicago-Style Citation template (Author date: page). Other non-academic resources should appear in footnotes and not in the final bibliography (e.g. news articles).

For English-language references: each word, except articles (a, the…) should be capitalised.

• Example: O’LEARY, Greg (ed.). 1998. Adjusting to Capitalism: Chinese Workers and the State. London: Routledge.

Please use Latin terms and abbreviations in your references as follows:

et al. – Ibid. – op. cit. – In

Academic references in the final bibliography should be in alphabetical order and should follow these templates:

BERGÈRE, Marie-Claire. 2013. Chine : le nouveau capitalisme d’État (China: The New State Capitalism). Paris: Fayard.

O’LEARY, Greg (ed.). 1998. Adjusting to Capitalism: Chinese Workers and the State. London: Routledge.

STONE, Martin. 2002. “Formalism.” In Jules COLEMAN, and Scott SHAPIRO (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 166-205.

SUN, Wanning. 2015. “Remembering the Age of Iron: Television Dramas about Chinese Workers in the Socialist Era.” China Perspectives 102: 33-41.

WANG, Xiaohua 王曉華. 2005. “關鍵的問題是如何讀經” (Guanjian de wenti shi ruhe dujing, The key issue is how to read classics). In HU Xiaoming 胡曉明 (ed.), 讀經: 啓蒙還是蒙昧 ? 來自民間的聲音 (Dujing: Qimeng haishi mengmei? Laizi minjian de shengyin, Dujing: Enlightenment or ignorance? Views from the society). Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe. 84-7.

 V. Languages

Chinese languages

1. As a Hong Kong journal, along with British English, we use Chinese traditional characters in our publications.
2. Chinese characters (ideally SimSun font) may be inserted directly into the text when relevant, and should be accompanied by their pinyin Romanisation in italics (without diacritics) and English translation. Any Chinese word or concept should always be transcribed in pinyin and translated into English. Pinyin prevails for transcribing Mandarin terms. Nevertheless, pinyin is not mandatory for other Chinese languages such as Cantonese – the authors can choose any type of romanisation for transcribing Chinese terms.

• Example:

The first example is privileged in the body of the text, while the second example is privileged in footnotes and final references.

1. Romanisation of Chinese words shall be made using pinyin, except for proper nouns that are usually transcribed in a different fashion (Sun Yat-sen), in particular Taiwanese names (Lee Teng-hui, Taipei), or transcriptions habitually made from Chinese languages other than Mandarin such as Cantonese (Wong Kar-wai).
2. References in Chinese:

• In a footnote

“胡錦濤在中國共產黨第十七次全國代表大會上的報告. 四 : 實現全面建設小康社會奮鬥目標的新要求” (Hu Jintao zai Zhongguo gongchandang di shiqi ci quanguo daibiao dahui shang de baogao. Si: Shixian quanmian jianshe xiaokang shehui fendou mubiao de xin yaoqiu, Hu Jintao’s report to the 17^th CCP Congress. Section 4: New requirements for realising the goal of building a well-off society in an all-round way), People’s Daily (人民日報), 25 October 2007, http://CCP.people.com.cn/GB/64093/67507/6429846.html (accessed on 15 October 2018).

• At the end of articles

YU, Keping 俞可平. 2005. “科學發展觀與生態文明” (Kexue fazhan guanyu shengtai wenming, Scientific development and ecological civilisation). Makesizhuyi yu xianshi (馬克思主義與現實) 2005(4): 4-5.

Other languages

Foreign words (i.e. that do not appear in a standard English dictionary) should be italicised. Names of foreign institutions and companies remain in roman style.

For the Romanisation of other languages (such as Cantonese, Japanese, Russian, etc.): please contact the editorial manager at chinaperspectives@cefc.com.hk.

VI. Quotations and quotations marks

1. Quotation marks should be standard double inverted commas with no space inserted (e.g. “the CCP”); quotation marks within quotations marks are single inverted commas (e.g. “Andrew Nathan believes these ‘reforms’ are a sign”).
2. Quotations of more than one sentence shall appear as an independent paragraph, preceded by a colon, without inverted commas.
3. Ellipses in quotations should be materialised by ellipsis points in parentheses, e.g. (…).

VII. Punctuation, dates and numbers

1. Punctuation marks directly follow the word preceding them; no space should be inserted before any punctuation mark. We use the Oxford (serial) comma.
2. Dates are given in day-month-year style: 27 July 1997. When referring to decades, use “the 1990s” rather than “the 1990’s” (do not use “the nineties”).
3. References to centuries should be spelled out, e.g. the twentieth century.
4. Use figures for numerals from 11 upward, as well as for percentages, ratios and all numbers with a decimal point. Thousands should be indicated by commas (e.g. 12,000 rather than 12 000). There should be no space between the figure and the percentage sign, e.g. 27%.
5. All measures should use the metric system.

VIII. Capitalisation

1. All nouns in titles of English books, magazines and articles, as well as in names of English or American companies or institutions should be capitalised.
2. Names of foreign titles, companies and institutions should follow the use in the respective language: in French and Chinese pinyin, only the first word (and the first noun in French) is capitalised.

IX. Tables and Graphs, and Illustrations

1. Tables and graphs should be submitted in separate Word files (all graphs and tables in one file). They should be numbered from 1 to n; each table or graph should include a title and a reference to its source and date.
2. In the text of the article, a “call-out” for the graphs or images should appear as follows: … (Table 1) …; … (Figure 4).

In addition to this reference in the text, the positioning of the graph or image in the layout should be materialised by an insert, preferably highlighted in yellow. Ex: “Insert here Table 1.”

3. We welcome illustrations (photographs, drawings, maps, etc.) provided that they are free of copyright and in high definition (at least 300 dpi – dots per inch). Photographs should be sent as a separate file in JPG or equivalent format (PNG, TIFF, etc.). Authors should provide a caption for each document and specify to whom the illustrations should be credited.

On a case-by-case basis, we may be able to purchase certain documents provided that the cost remains reasonable. This should be discussed with the editor.

4. Movie stills. In the specific case of movie stills, the journal may be able to include them in the article under the terms of “fair use.” Cf. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.cmstudies.org/resource/resmgr/docs/fairusefilmstills.pdf. The director’s name, production company and year of release should be provided.
5. Maps. Authors may submit their own maps, either hand-made or issued by cartography departments (if free of copyright) along with articles.

X. Chinese institutions

China Perspectives uses the following standard translations for Chinese institutions and administrative divisions:

CCP (Chinese Communist Party)

State Council (Guowuyuan 國務院)

PLA: People’s Liberation Army (Renmin jiefang jun 人民解放軍)

County (xian 縣) ; town (zhen 鎮); township (xiang 鄉)

Please see also the following simplified overview of administrative levels in the PRC: