INTRODUCTION

This chapter reviews the development of China's Southeast Asian Studies since the 1950s, especially after the late 1970s. It also examines profiles of major Southeast Asian research centres in China and identifies their changing research focus. In doing so, we attempt to capture the changes in the field of Southeast Asian Studies and challenges faced by this specific academic circle in China.

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, China's Southeast Asian Studies have undergone the following stages of development — initial development from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, paralysis from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s because of the Cultural Revolution, rebuilding of the programme in the 1980s after economic reform, expansion in the 1990s, and diversification and rapid development in the 2000s. We argue that at each stage, China's Southeast Asian Studies have been influenced profoundly by both China-ASEAN relations and China's domestic political environment for academic research.

This chapter begins with a brief review of the history of Southeast Asian Studies in China, from the 1950s to the present. The next part analyses the contents of articles on Southeast Asia in China and identifies this changing research focus and interests. The following part suggests a number of remaining academic challenges for China's Southeast Asian scholars. Our studies draw on reviews on the field by China's and Singapore's scholars presented at the Conference on “Southeast Asian Studies in China: Challenges and Prospects” held on 12–14 January 2006 in Singapore. Data for our paper also come from our interviews with regional research institutes in China (administered by Tok Sow Keat), information provided by these research institutes or by their websites or publications, and our analysis of contents of leading publications. Our study also benefits from earlier and brief surveys of China's Southeast Asian programmes, including those by Wang (1985) and Curley and Liu (2002) especially by Liu Yong Zhuo (1994), Chen Qiaozhi and others (1992), Zhang Liang and Yang (2002), and Liu Hong (2003). The former two systemic overviews of Southeast Asian Studies were published in 1992 and 1994 respectively, and its information appeared to be rather dated. Liu Hong provides a comprehensive and useful, as well as the most recent, study of Southeast Asian programmes in China.