2018 not only marks the 40th anniversary of China’s reform and opening up, but also witnesses the four decades of rapid development of communication research in China. Through a bibliometrics analysis of Social Sciences Citation Indexed journal articles in the field of communication, this article seeks to depict a big picture of the international publications of China’s communication research. Results show that Chinese scholars did not publish on SSCI journals until early 1990s, but the quantity of the publications climbed sharply in the recent decade to the ranking of global top 10. Even the number of journal articles published by scholars in Mainland China can be ranked 15th in the whole world. These scholars are from a good variety of disciplines, while journalism and communication scholars have yet established a leading role in the international publications of communication research, including both article amount and citation frequency. The research agenda are highly concentrated to three areas, psychology and behavior research exemplified by Internet addiction, industry and policy research around technology adoption and use, and public opinion and political participation research based on the theory of public sphere. The theoretical contribution is still limited. While Chinese scholars have gone beyond the early phases of introducing and validating Western communication theories, and have started extending and developing these theories, the founding of original communication theories remains to be an arduous journey for Chinese scholars to accomplish.