Political history has for long been a fundamental research area of the Institute of Modern Chinese History. With a focus on the 1911 Revolution, the Research Center for Political History devotes itself to political history and has obtained significant achievements. Since the one hundredth anniversary of the 1911 revolution, we have been broadening our research realm and paying increasing attention to revolutions in China throughout the twentieth century. We are concerned of violent revolutions, as well as non-violent revolutions in relation to the politics, social thoughts, family and souls. We host the “Twentieth-century Revolutions in China research group” and the “Sun Yat-sen Research Group”, so as to bring together the academic strength within and outside our Institute. We believe that probing various revolutions in twentieth-century China enhances the research on political history as a whole and deepens our overall understanding of the past century.

In recent years, historians of modern China at home and abroad have increasingly turned to a transition of research paradigm and an extension of temporospatial realm to evaluate the past, with a goal of broadening academic insights. Against this context, the Research Center for Socio-economic History focuses on how China’s socio-economic developments proceeded and evolved in the modern period on the one hand, and is concerned of how China’s economic interaction with foreign forces impacted on the transition of Chinese society on the other. By exploring and delving into these topics, we hope to contribute to the “divergence” and “convergence” debates in economic history, and reveal the humanist values within the socio-economic transformations in modern China.

The Research Center for the History of Thought and Culture was established on the basis of our institute’s abundant research on the people and thoughts related to the 1911 revolution. Created by Professor Zhang Kaiyuan and extensively explored by Professor Luo Fuhui and other colleagues, the research focus has gradually been extended to the changes of thoughts and cultures as well as the changes’ social impacts in modern China. Specifically, our research center include research regarding to the history of thought, the history of culture, the history of academy, the history of education, the history of university, the history of labor and social movements, and so on. While examining these topics, we aim to combine the changes of modern educational institutes with the evolution of thoughts and cultures, combine the spread of elite culture with the movements of labors, and incorporate relevant cultural elements of Taiwan into our overall concern for the thoughts and cultures in modern China. Currently, we are mainly working on the history of universities in modern China.

The Research Center for the History of the Religion and the Society was established on the basis of the Research Center for the History of Missionary Universities in China created by Professor Zhang Kaiyuan, the latter of which had for long focused on the history of missionary universities and Christianity in modern China and enjoyed a worldwide fame. In the recent years, we have been paying increasing attention to the historical research of Buddhism and Taoism, and therefore re-organized the center that now include research on the history of religion and society as a whole. We look into the evolutionary history of religions such as Buddhism, Taoism, Protestantism and Catholicism in China from Ming and Qing dynasties onwards, and investigate the interplay of these religions and the Chinese society from multiple aspects. By doing so, we hope to further analyze how these religions were connected to politics, economics and cultures in China. Currently, we focus on the transition of religions during social changes, the interplay between politics and religions, and religions' adaptation to local cultures in modern China.