Contemporary accounting developments in China

This Special Issue originates from the Global Chinese Accounting Association’s (GCAA) 2nd Summit that took place at Nanjing Audit University in Nanjing, China on 2–3 November 2019. The GCAA was established in April 2018 in Perth, Western Australia. It is a non-profit organisation initiated by Chinese accounting academics and professionals from universities and corporations globally. This conference was designed to promote research linkages, industry connections, and global education. This conference provided accounting academics incredible opportunities to collaborate with editors from highly recognised journals such as Accounting Forum, and to meet experienced accounting researchers from around the world. Further, this event provided a fantastic opportunity to develop collaborations, further consolidating a growing network of Chinese and international researchers interested in accounting issues. While this Special Issue was in collaboration with the Summit, the Call for Papers was open and public, hence inviting any researcher interested in the Chinese context to submit a manuscript. It aimed to provide a high-quality outlet for presenting research insights and findings from various contemporary accounting developments in China. It is important to highlight that the COVID-19 pandemic (which began not long after the Summit and the Special Issue’s deadline) has made the editorial process difficult for everyone involved – particularly the authors and the reviewers whom we sincerely thank for their perseverance and support in the editorial process, respectively. Thanks to them, we have finally been able to complete the Special Issue in September 2021 with five papers passing the thorough and rigorous peer review process, and eventually accepted for publication. In the Call for Papers, we had stated that the Special Issue was particularly interested in “papers that explore unique Chinese features of accounting and auditing and the causes and consequences of these features, although comparative studies are also welcome” and “papers about innovative practices and theories of accounting and auditing developed in China”, and that it was “open to any theoretical paradigms and research approaches”. We had also specified that the Special Issue will “focus on the effects of recent social, economic and political reforms and technological advancements on accounting and auditing in China and their changing role in corporate management as well as social and economic development”. This collection of five papers provides a robust response to this call.