Preface

  Hadron99 was the 8th international conference on hadron
spectroscopy held in Beijing, Aug. 24 to 28, 1999. This
conference had an attendence of xx physicists, among them
xxx were from abroad.

  Hadron spectroscopy studies the structure of the hadrons,
the nature of their constituents and the interactions between them.
Constituent Quark Model (CQM) had great success in explaining the mass
spectrum of mesons and baryons, and the cross section ratio of
mesons and baryons with targets. But the current understanding
is that QCD should be the correct theory for strong interactions.
Many QCD based approaches have been attempted to describe hadron
spectroscopy, but failed to reach the level of agreement between
the experimental data and the predictions enjoyed by the CQM.

  In this conference, many new results from different experiments  
were presented, new theoretical ideas and calculations
were discussed. As we can see from the presentations in
this conference, the hadron spectroscopy is still a very
interesting and active field in high energy physics. The
searches for glueball, hybrid and exotic states are really
important in verifying the QCD nature of strong interactions
and in improving our understanding of interactions between 
hadron constituents at medium energy scale.

  To truly make breakthrough in this field, we believe that
much progresses have to be made both from experiments and theoretical
predictions. Various experiments at different machines and
using different methods should come together to provide
a coherent and consistent picture of the experimental facts,
and theorists should provide more convincing and precise  
predictions. For example, only after a few gluonic states
are found experimentally, which match with better theoretical
predictions of gluonic spectrum, then we can convince ourselves
that glueball states exist. 

  We hope that this conference had served the purpose to
provide an opportunity for physicists working in this
field to meet regularly and to exchange new informations
and ideas together. The local organization committee
would thank the speakers at this conference for their
presentations and careful preparation of their papers. The
conference chairman would use this opportunity to thank
Prof. HUANG Yizhi and Mr. HOU Ruichen for their dedicated
work to make the conference a success. And the editors
would thanks Mr. YUAN Ye, CHENG Baosen and Mrs. ZHANG Lin
for their hard work in preparing this proceeding.
We wish the next conference Hadron2001, to be held in
Protvino of Russia, a complete success.