Quite some scholars in the management field are advocating the indigenous research in China. It is not limited to the management field actually. Here is a paper written by two accounting professors who share their concerns about following western scholars and the need to do indigenous research. You are welcomed to join in this debate. If you have any comments and thoughts, please send them to iacmrmembership@pku.edu.cn and we will post them in our website for further discussions.

Summary points of the article by Peter Ping Li, Professor of Chinese Business Studies, Copenhagen Business School:

1. The salient accounting issues in the US are fundamentally DISTINCTIVE from those facing the Chinese firms.

2. The English journal editors and reviewers are mostly interested in the salient accounting issues in the US or the West, but NOT interested in those salient accounting issues facing the Chinese firms.

3. The English journal editors and reviewers are NOT familiar with the salient accounting issues in China, so they are NOT the best judges of the quality of China-related papers.

4. The English journal editors and reviewers apply the biased and outdated criteria of generalizability (US-based research is assumed to be universal) to all non-Western research.

5. The most relevant question for Chinese scholars is for “whom” we do research. Chinese scholars should focus on Chinese issues.

6. Chinese accounting scholars should NOT follow the footsteps of their US or Western counterparts, and should not target the English journals as their primary outlets of publications.

7. It is wrong for the Chinese universities to prefer returnees for their new hires, while the domestic graduates have limited job opportunities.

Introduction and comments from Pingping Fu, Associate Professor of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

It’s a very long paper and was given a special attention by the Accounting Journal. In a nutshell, the authors gave all the reasons they thought that it is time that academicians in China should quit following western scholars, relying on testing their models or replicating their studies, but rather look inside and rebuild confidence in the thousand-year old culture, see what our ancestors had left us and try to use those to explain phenomena that are different from the west. They also criticized all the current evaluation systems that are to blame for the situation in China today. They pointed out that the unprecedented development in China should give us confidence to build our own way forward.