The Lise Meitner Research Group “China in the Global System of Science” explores social structures of science and scholarship in contemporary China and the relationships between societal norms and values, the political regime, and the country’s ambition to become a constitutive and dominating part of world science. Researchers combine methods from the social sciences, area studies, and other disciplines to investigate China’s science policy and governance, the development of scientific disciplines and epistemic communities, public communication of science and institutional features of international academic cooperation. In a general and comparative perspective, the group’s work contributes to scholarship on the dynamics of global structures of scientific knowledge production and their local varieties.