Chinese Studies

While scholarly works in English are collected systematically and extensively to support Chinese Studies, the establishment of a Chinese language collection as a part of the East Asia Collection is a recent undertaking. Duke’s Chinese collection focuses on contemporary economics, politics and society, public policy and regional cultures and Buddhist and avant-garde art history. Most notably, we are building a unique collection of materials in popular culture, including television dramas, films, fashion magazines, newspapers, and best sellers. Currently there are about 33,000 volumes of Chinese materials in the collection, including books, journals, yearbooks, films, microform and maps.  Electronic databases, whether bibliographic or full text, provide additional support.  Special Collections also houses a collection of scripts for Chinese newsreels from the late 50s till the end of the Cultural Revolution.

Duke has a longstanding cooperative collection development agreement with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), which held collection responsibilities for Chinese materials. This was modified in 1996 in response to the dramatic growth in East Asian studies programs on both campuses. Duke is concentrating on materials not collected in depth at UNC, especially popular culture and the contemporary social sciences. It has built a unique collection of popular magazines and newspapers, a sizeable collection of Chinese film and TV dramas (over 2000 titles), a strong collection of statistical yearbooks and core titles in literature and history.  UNC is strong in Chinese history, literature and religion.