Over the past decades, Chinese infrastructure, capital, firms, workers, media and culture have moved outward across the world at a scale that has made "Global China" one of the defining objects of contemporary scholarship. Yet the term is strikingly unstable: invoked across a wide range of fields, it has been used, alternately, to name a policy, a power mechanism, a method, a relation. The Berlin Contemporary China Network's 2026/27 lecture series takes the fluidity of the concept as its point of departure. It opens by critically asking what kind of thing "Global China" even is and why the concept has seen such widespread uptake. From there, the series follows the concept through diverse and new uses.

It begins with Global China as something the Chinese state projects onto the world, and moves toward a Global China that diasporic communities author for themselves, frequently without Beijing and occasionally against it. The lectures discuss China's international engagement with a post-Cold War order shaped by the West, China's rise in global environmental governance, and the Afro-Asian histories of race, labour and debt that run through the Chinese Caribbean, before a closing panel explores diasporic Chinese people's relationship to their heritage as well as broader narratives around China in the media to ask whose Global China gets told.

Hosted by the Berlin Contemporary China Network (BCCN) and the Lise Meitner Research Group "China in the Global System of Science" (LMRG), the 2026/27 winter term lecture series is conceptualized and organized by Dr. Franziska Marliese Fröhlich and Fiona Anne Bewley from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.