Global China Lab APS is a non-profit organisation legally registered in Italy with the mission of creating a platform for open and accessible knowledge about China in both its domestic and global dimensions.

The initiative has its roots in a newsletter on labour rights in China aimed at Italian trade union officials established in the early 2010s. In 2016, thanks to the involvement of a group of early-career China scholars, the newsletter was reimagined as a journal in English with a focus on Chinese labour and civil society. From that point on, the project quickly developed in previously unforeseen directions, including today’s Made in China Journal, People’s Map of Global China, and Global China Pulse, as well as the book series, multimedia projects, and events that are featured on this website.

All our initiatives rest on two pillars: the conviction that today more than ever it is necessary to bridge the gap between the scholarly community and the public, and the related belief that open access is necessary to ethically reappropriate academic research from commercial publishers who restrict the free circulation of ideas through the imposition of paywalls unaffordable to many.

The Global China Lab will bring these separate but interconnected projects together under a single umbrella, allowing us to better showcase the wealth of material that we and our hundreds of contributors have produced over the past decade.