Scholarly Communication in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan

Citation

MacDonald, R. (2009), "Scholarly Communication in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan", The Electronic Library, Vol. 27 No. 2, pp. 349-350. https://doi.org/10.1108/026404709

At some level, all stories are about conflict. This is amply illustrated in Scholarly Communication in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, which relates the scholarly development of five Asian nations and shows how divergent scholarly traditions have wrestled with governmental change, economic shift, external influences, and technological innovations to assume remarkably different forms today.

Anthropologist‐turned‐library scientist Jingfeng Xia has brought together an excellent collection of essays detailing many aspects of intellectual life in Asia. Each chapter describes the scholarly milieu of one country, beginning with an account of the historical influences that have acted on local scholarly development, including Confucianism in ancient China, Japanese colonisation in South Korea, fascination with Western civilisation in nineteenth century Japan, and the dramatic political and technological changes since World War II. China's long‐lived civilisation repeatedly emerges as an influence in the intellectual heritage of the other countries studied. The local responses to this have been varied: in ancient Korea, a rational alphabet (Hangul) was created to address the poor fit of Chinese writing to the Korean language, while in Japan Chinese philosophies and literature slowly morphed into uniquely local styles.

Informed by these historical summaries, the analysis of the current scholarly communication system in each country includes descriptions of higher education (universities and colleges – numbers, student numbers, funding, the state of various disciplines, the role of mentorship), publishing (general and scholarly, monographs and journals, the role of university presses), libraries (numbers, varieties, roles), linguistics, copyright, and digital communications. The resultant pictures are complex and illuminating. For example, the majority of journal publishing in Japanese humanities and social sciences is a sort of grey literature consisting of typically un‐reviewed, irregularly published kiyō journals. Elsewhere we learn that South Korea is perhaps the most wired country in the world and, through its national “informatization” project, aims to create the first “ubiquitous society” with information available anywhere anytime; in contrast, Japan lags in adopting electronic scholarly communication, partly because of the popularity of cell phones for viewing online content. China's influence continues in a variety of ways, as illustrated by the effects of reunification on Hong Kong, or the surprisingly free and plentiful scholarly exchange between mainland China and Taiwan. While there is much scholarly exchange, there are also problems of isolation: translation into or out of English is a perpetual issue for all five nations; humanities scholars are often uninterested with communicating with scholars from other countries due to the local nature of their studies; and the chapter on South Korea contains a single wistful paragraph on North Korea.

The entries are largely positive, but there is some criticism, as when Stephen Luk questions the quality of university education in Hong Kong. Most authors indicate areas that need improvement, noting for instance the plight of humanities disciplines that struggle for funding while science, technology, and medicine are promoted in the interest of technological progress. This book ably describes the history, developments, and opportunities in scholarly communication in its nominated countries, and leaves the reader eager to know more about the Asian countries not included.