Ma Qinghua, born in Nantong, Jiangsu province in 1964, is a professor of Modern Chinese and Linguistics at the School of Liberal Arts, Nanjing University. He is a doctoral supervisor with research interests in modern Chinese syntax and semantics, theoretical linguistics, and teaching Chinese as a foreign language. He is the editor-in-chief of the Macrolinguistics journal (ISSN 1934-5755; e-ISSN 2473-6376), a journal founded by Nanjing University Double First-class Discipline Construction Program, and is recognized as a New Century Excellent Talent by the Ministry of Education. He is the academic leader of “Research on Complex System Theory of Language” a double-class construction discipline of Chinese Language and Literature in Nanjing University. He proposed the Systematic Operational Grammar in 2005 (the last chapter of the Study of Self-Organization of Parallel Structures) and has been working in this field for a long time. He advocated the four spirits of governance, i.e., pioneering spirit, scientific spirit, national spirit, and practical spirit in 2008, and has cultivated 23 Ph.D. graduates. He has taught at Soochow University, Wenzhou University, Nanjing University, National Okayama University in Japan, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, and many other universities in China and abroad, and has taught at universities for more than 35 years. He has published eight books in Commercial Press, China Social Science Press, Science Press, Language & Culture Press, Shanghai People’s Publishing House, Jiangxi People’s Publishing House, Jilin People’s Publishing House, and Fudan University Press. His papers have been published in Studies of the Chinese Language, Foreign Language Teaching and Research (Beijing Foreign Studies University), Journal of Foreign Languages, Minority Languages of China, Essays on Linguistics (Peking University), Studies in Language and Linguistics, Chinese Teaching in the World, Linguistic Research, Linguistic Sciences, Chinese Linguistics, Contemporary Rhetoric/Rhetoric Learning, Journal of East China Normal University, Journal of Soochow University, Journal of Shanxi University, Journal of Nanjing Normal University, Ningxia Social Sciences, Academic Exchange, Chinese Language Learning, TCSOL Studies, Language Planning, Journal of Dongwu Foreign Languages (Taiwan Province), China Academic Yearbook (Taiwan Province), Chinese Language Research (Japan), Macrolinguistics, and other publications. Multiple papers have been reprinted in full by the Copy of Newspaper and Publication Materials at Renmin University of China such as Linguistics and Philology, detailed excerpts from Academic Abstracts of Liberal Arts in Higher Education Institutions, or reviewed by China Academic Yearbook. His writings have won several provincial government social science awards and various other prizes.

Early research (1986-1998) focused on solving the mysteries of Chinese grammar and questioned certain “consensuses” in Chinese linguistics based on evidence. He systematically analyzed the conceptual and syntactic semantic structures of words and sentences. Mid-term research (1999-2004) mainly explored grammatical mechanisms, cultural semantics, and applied semantics, and formed three major series of research results. Later (2005-present), the focus has been on researching his independently proposed system of operational grammar. Through an in-depth analysis of specific syntactic and semantic problems, his results demonstrate a series of principles and mechanisms of self-organization and other organization, such as linguistic genesis, system dynamics models, iteration (iterative systems of language, iterative models, multidimensional iteration, etc.), variable control, homology integration, adaptation, schematization, system self-propagation, compensation (as opposed to “substitution”), multidimensional covariation, semantic resonance, perspective differentiation, operations, field constraints, etc. Many of these categories or their essential connotations and argumentation methods are the first of their kind in linguistics, and create a number of effective analytical paradigms. He used them to systematically uncover many unnoticed language rules, and arrived at many important original conclusions by conducting in-depth analyses of specific issues such as original word-class features, syntactic valence, multi-wave multidimensional reference, expansion conditions for group association ranges, grammar implementation conditions for double representation structure sentences, modal governance structures, formation of syntactic structure rule systems, systematization of sentence logical structure, acceptable variation, semantic attenuation during the reference process, mutation absorption, typology of pronoun systems, interaction and optimization of multiple word order principles, formation of exceptional grammar rules, and the profound impact of the extralinguistic world on meaning expression. These findings demonstrate excellent abilities in discovery, explanation, and proof. In addition, the later achievements are still in high-level theory, which deeply discusses the essence of language complexity and solves the theoretical misconceptions in the study of language complex systems; In terms of factual breadth, a systematic study has been conducted on the complex extreme language type - polysynthetic language. In the later stage, pioneering achievements were also made in the field of applied research, including the vocabulary field of Chinese international education and the field of stylistic metrology.

He founded the international linguistic journal Macrolinguistics (ISSN 1934-5755) in 2007, with the aim of promoting in-depth research on non-Indo-European languages, particularly advocating research with universal theoretical value to enhance complementarity and interaction with Indo-European language research, and to prosper the linguistic undertaking of the world, which has had a good international academic impact.