A kaleidoscope of trajectories: research in/on/with China

Over the last year, we have sought to reframe what The Journal of Architecture could be about, drawing attention to the important roles that architecture and research about architecture, in many forms and guises, could play in the face of pressing global challenges. We look back at efforts to expand, include, destabilise, and decolonise in calling for more diverse, more engaged, and more relevant scholarship. Now, we look forward to exploring and engaging in new ways with our authors and our readership. In the new year, we will be launching our annual event On the Edge with a talk by and discussion with Tatjana Schneider on ‘Architecture in the Climate Emergency’. We are also excited to launch The Journal of Architecture’s brand-new website (www.thejournalofarchitecture.com), an accessible online platform providing information about the journal, summaries of recently published articles, open-access editorials and commentaries, building reviews, tips and tricks, and much, much more. We are closing this transformative year with a double issue that explores current, multifaceted research in/on/with China. What does architecture mean in China and what does Chinese architecture mean to architecture at large were historically, not so long ago, part of polemical debates tied to questions of modernisation, which triggered a series of experimental studies and practices to both prove and disprove certain assumptions imposed by the dominant Western culture. In the midst of China’s war-torn period from the 1920s to the 40s, the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture (SRCA) published an article titled ‘Why Study Chinese Architecture?’ by one of its founding member Liang Sicheng. He poignantly described the rapid loss of historical buildings due to the blind drive of progress to adopt ‘Western buildings’ while remain adamant that Chinese architecture must find its own path towards modernisation, which he believed required both modern scholarship of physical remnants of the past, from physical construction, artistic legacy, to cultural consciousness, and modern sciences to understand old and new materials and methods of buildings. A century has passed, and what may be the inevitable dichotomous framework between West, represented by the architectural discipline arisen in the European and American context, and East, represented by a much wider realm of the ‘other’ and the ‘beyond’ from the middle, south, to the far east of Asia, in that period of the early twentieth century had definitely waned. The conundrum of Liang’s time to search for a form of architecture that may