Resources

After almost a year of work, we have finalized the first release of our comprehensive, open-access digital dataset comprising over 38,000 digitized historical records of Chinese lianhuanhua publications (1949–1994)!

Provided in a comma-separated values (CSV) format, the dataset digitizes over 1,200 printed pages of densely packed tables to document detailed publication information for over 38,000 unique lianhuanhua published between 1949 and 1992.

As such, the dataset not only systematizes publication data as preserved in these two decades-old catalogues, but also reveals novel, multilayered connections across tens of thousands of titles, deepening our understanding of what was one of the world’s most widely consumed reading materials throughout the twentieth century.

Read all about the dataset on the GitHub repository page or reference it via Zenodo:

We are happy to share our comprehensive reference list of selected scholarly publications on lianhuanhua—Chinese comics—compiled by the ChinaComx project (most recent update: 26 September 2025).

This list is to serve as both an entry point for students of Chinese visual culture and a curated snapshot of current scholarship. It is not a peer-reviewed bibliography, nor should exclusion from this list be taken as a negative judgment; it is simply a selection of texts we find particularly interesting at this moment and hope will be useful to other researchers.

We hope you might approach this list as an invitation: it invites you to read and engage with the vast academic literature on all things lianhuanhua; it invites you to share with us other publications that we might have overlooked; and it invites all of us to explore the fascinating world(s) of Chinese comics.