Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences?

At present China is challenging the leading sciento-economic powers and evolving to one of the world's largest potentials in science and technology. Jointly with other emerging economies, China has already changed the balance of power among the formerly leading nations as measured by scientific production. In the present paper, the evolution of China's publication activity and citation impact in the social sciences is studied for the period 1997-2006. Besides the comparative analysis of trends in publication and citation patterns and of national publication profiles, an attempt is made to interpret the results in both the regional and global context.