Chinese Studies *: Books

A union catalog for many academic, public, and special libraries in North America and around the world. It is the best place for you to discover materials that are not available at USC.

CRG is a centralized means for discovery and access to a breadth of Chinese resources, including scholarly journals, monographs, statistical publications, government documents, newspapers, dissertations, patents, and more.

Known as the Chinese Google Scholar, Duxiu provides access to a huge amount of full-text scholarly resources in all subjects and formats, such as books, theses & dissertations, journal & newspaper articles, conference papers, etc. For instructions about how to request full-text content from the database, paste this link in the browser https://libraries.usc.edu/sites/default/files/duxiu_instructions.pdf

Includes over 2.5 million scanned books, newspapers, journals, video, audio books, etc. from all periods of Chinese history. The titles are not full-text searchable, but they provide tables of contents for easy navigation and virtual loan. Also provides access to some other resources, such as calligraphy, chronicle of Chinese literature, and Chinese medicine. Please note that you need to create an individual account using USC email address with the site in order to use their online reading and virtual borrowing functionalities for each title. Please refer to their FAQ section for more instructions.

USC’s subscription includes 1200+ titles primarily on Chinese literature and history, as well as linguistics, geography, environmental sciences, politics, law and a few other subjects.

Contains a growing collection of Chinese e-books published in mainland China. To access the e-book collection, please click the link “click to enter” on the homepage, and then click the subject areas listed under the “SuperStar Digital Library” section to browse and read titles acquired by USC libraries.

Includes a growing collection of e-books published in Taiwan and Hong Kong acquired by the USC libraries.

Provides access to facts and statistics of national and regional significance in mainland China from 1949 to present.

Local gazetteers are regarded by scholars and historians in the China field as one of the most important primary sources for the study of history of Chinese economy, politics, culture, military, and science and technology. This database includes a large collection of post-1949 local gazetteers covering all regions of mainland China and various subject areas.

Diaolong Full-text Database of Chinese & Japanese Ancient Books is a project based on collaboration among scholars and experts from China, Japan, and Taiwan. It is one of the most comprehensive collections of Chinese and Japanese ancient books. It contains about 30,000 ancient books covering historical, political, economic, religious, philosophic, literary, ethnic and geographic documents.

'Pishu' (皮书, which literally means ‘cover-books’) are high-value analytical reports intended to guide policymaking in the People’s Republic of China. They are published by the prestigious Social Sciences Academic Press, a branch of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Covered topics include a variety of issues of importance to China's government and research community, including international relations, agricultural policy, and industry competitiveness. They may be considered somewhat analogous to United States Congressional Research Service reports and analysis reports published by the RAND Corporation.

Includes 20,000+ volumes and 650,000+ articles of Chinese literary and historical materials compiled by the national and local government agencies mostly during the 1980s and 1990s. To access the database, please click the link “click to enter” on the homepage, then click “文史资料专题库 (第一期)" under “SuperStar specialty” section, and then you will then be able to browse and search the wenshi ziliao collection.

Scans of public domain books across all subject areas which can be downloaded in their entirety. To enable downloads, please click the “Log In” button and select “University of Southern California” from the dropdown list. You will then be prompted for your USC NetID and password and validated via Shibboleth. You will also find records for works still in copyright, but these can only be searched, not viewed or downloaded.