A UK-based independent worldwide fellowship
Abstract: From the perspectives of the sociology of knowledge and global governance, this section reflects on the triadic knowledge framework that the Global China Academy (GCA) has developed across its fellowship system, the Global China Dialogue, and transcultural publishing. The fellowship system operates not merely as an academic honour but as an institutionalised mode of knowledge governance: through cross-disciplinary evaluation and transcultural understanding, it generates agendas, organises knowledge resources, and deepens systematic research on China within global and comparative frameworks. The Global China Dialogue, as an institutionalised public sphere, transforms the professional judgements of the fellowship community into capacities for cross-civilisational deliberation, enabling scholarship to move from one-way narration toward interaction, mutual interpretation, and co-construction. Meanwhile, the transcultural publishing system of Global Century Press (GCP) advances cross-cultural commensurability in cognitive structures through the deep alignment of language, culture and knowledge systems, with its systematic treatment of Chinese name conventions serving as only one operational example of this broader publishing philosophy. Together, these mechanisms demonstrate how GCA’s integrated framework fosters reflective, comparative and globally intelligible knowledge production, thereby contributing to the ongoing shaping and renewal of the global knowledge order.
The Global China Academy (GCA) is an independent global fellowship institution registered in the United Kingdom and dedicated to advancing comprehensive studies on China in the social sciences and humanities. The Academy adopts a language-based approach to global and comparative perspectives, highlighting social creativity, transcultural perspectives, and interdisciplinary methodologies, with the aim of contributing to the advancement of human knowledge. At the same time, the Academy encourages public engagement in global social development and governance. Through the dissemination of research outputs, knowledge transfer, social consultation, and public participation, GCA fulfils its dual mission—academic and social.
Since its establishment in 2013, the Global China Academy has gradually developed into a globally influential fellowship-based institution. Its governance structure consists of a Board of Trustees, operating under UK charity law, is responsible for institutional governance and strategic oversight; and the GCA Council recommends Fellows, enhances the Academy’s reputation, promotes academic publishing, and proposes themes and speakers for the Global China Dialogue (GCD).
Our publishing subsidiary, Global Century Press (GCP), produces journals and books to advance our academic and social mission of fostering deep, evidence-based understanding and shared global knowledge between China and the world. GCP is the only independent platform dedicated to publishing uncensored research on China.
GCA also hosts the annual Global China Dialogue (GCD) to encourage public participation in global social development and governance. As a transcultural dialogue platform, GCD is dedicated to fostering communication and exchange between China and countries around the world.
Fellowship of the Global China Academy
Fellowship is the institutional core of the Global China Academy, bringing together influential thinkers, eminent scholars, and widely respected practitioners worldwide, advancing transdisciplinary, transcultural, cross-regional, cross-sector exchange and collaboration, participation in global governance and the building of a forward-looking human knowledge system.
The highest level of fellowship—Fellow of the Global China Academy (FGCA)—is awarded to distinguished scholars, policy experts, public intellectuals, and professionals from around the world. These individuals have made outstanding contributions to China studies with global and comparative perspectives, human social development, global governance, world peace, and transcultural understanding. They play significant roles in the social sciences, humanities, cultural studies, international relations, public policy, education, media, and related fields. Fellowship is both an honour and a recognition of academic influence, social contribution, and transcultural leadership.
After GCA obtained UK Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO) status in 2021, in order to align with the structures of bodies such as the UK Academy of Social Sciences and to expand international networks, GCA has also established Associate Fellowship and Institutional Fellowship, bringing higher education institutions, research institutes, government bodies, think tanks, and international organisations into the GCA network. Fellows, Associate Fellows, and Institutional Fellows are now based in the UK, France, Germany, the US, Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, and multiple regions of China.
Fellows engage directly in GCA’s academic development and global impact through participating in the Global China Dialogue (GCD), chairing forums, guiding research, leading transnational projects, and supporting publications (such as those of Global Century Press). Further, they offer strategic advice, support editing and publishing, provide intellectual input for the Global China Dialogue, such as proposing annual themes and session structures, and advance cross-cultural and international cooperation.
Fellowship conferment ceremonies are typically held during the Global China Dialogue. Information on fellowship entitlements, responsibilities, a list of Fellows, the Fellows’ Home, and nomination procedures can be found on GCA’s website. We welcome colleagues with international vision, transcultural experience, and academic or professional influence to join us in advancing global discourse and the co-creation of human knowledge.
Global China Dialogue
The Global China Dialogue (GCD) is not only the flagship annual event of GCA but also the yearly gathering of the FGCA community—a key platform through which the Academy fulfils its mission, advances collaboration, and contributes to governance. As a transcultural forum, the Dialogue brings together Fellows, scholars, policymakers, and practitioners from around the world to address shared global challenges through constructive and forward-looking exchange.
Fellows play a central intellectual role in shaping the Dialogue. Many contribute to agenda-setting by proposing annual themes and session structures, and they participate as keynote speakers, chairs, moderators, and discussants across the programme. Their cross-disciplinary expertise and transcultural perspectives help ensure that each Dialogue reflects global knowledge, comparative insights, and the highest standards of academic and public engagement.
GCD also functions as an important governance node within the Academy’s institutional architecture. One of GCA’s two annual Board of Trustees meetings is held during the Dialogue, enabling Fellows, Trustees, and key community members to jointly review strategic development, governance priorities, and international partnerships. The Dialogue also hosts the annual conferment of new Fellows, Associate Fellows, and Institutional Fellows—strengthening the fellowship community and recognising academic excellence, transcultural leadership, and contributions to global governance.
Beyond the formal sessions, the GCD annual dinner serves as a major gathering of Fellows, deepening collegial ties and providing an inclusive space for exchange among Fellows, invited guests, and international partners. Through conversations with leaders from government, business, culture, and civil society, Fellows help build cross-sector cooperation and contribute expertise to a more open, interconnected, and mutually learning global order.
In this way, the Global China Dialogue is not only an international academic summit but also a structural anchor of the Fellows system—linking dialogue, governance, publishing, and transnational collaboration, and shaping the evolving global impact of the Global China Academy.
So far, we have successfully held ten Global China Dialogues as planned and are currently preparing for the tenth. The themes of the above four planned dialogues (2027-30) may be slightly adjusted.
Past and future programmes of the series have been developed within the framework of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which accord with UNESCO’s mission of defending peace and the conditions for building sustainable development world through creative intelligence, as follows:
- 2030 GCD XV: Global Sustainable Development and Security Governance
- 2029 GCD XIV: Global Energy Governance and Disaster Management
- 2028 GCD XIII: Global Labour and Sustainable Development
- 2027 GCD XII: Global Migration Governance
- 2026 GCD XI: Global AI and Data Governance
- 2025 GCD X: Governance for Global Education
- 2024 GCD IX: Global Governance for AI
- 2023 GCD VIII: Governance for Global Health
- 2021 GCD VII: Reforming Global Governance
- 2019 GCD VI: Governance for World Peace
- 2018 GCD V: Governance for Global Justice
- 2017 GCD IV: The Belt and Road (B&R) – Transcultural Cooperation for Shared Goals
- 2016 GCD III: Sustainability and Global Governance for Climate Change
- 2015 GCD II: Transculturality and New Global Governance
- 2014 GCD I: The Experience of China’s Modernization from a Comparative Perspective
Global Century Press
Global Century Press (GCP), established in 2014 (Company No. 08892970), is the publishing arm of the Global China Academy (GCA). GCP is a key platform for disseminating Fellows’ and others’ research and advancing global and comparative studies on China.
As the first international publisher dedicated to English–Chinese dual-language academic publishing in the social sciences and humanities, GCP provides a high-quality, transcultural platform linking China and the world. Its publications include peer-reviewed journals, monographs, edited volumes, conference proceedings, Chinese-for-social-science textbooks, and reference works in multiple formats (print, e-books, video, audio, online and mobile platforms). Fellows play crucial roles as authors, editors, reviewers, and advisory board members, ensuring academic quality and international credibility.
GCP has developed its own House Style, drawing on APA 7 and Chinese national standards. This style guide has evolved through long-term dual-language editorial practice involving Fellows, authors, translators, and design teams. It forms the basis for a dual-language publishing system.
GCP adopts an open-access and subscription-based dual model, with 80% of its content freely accessible. This promotes academic exchange while ensuring sustainable publishing and ongoing support for Fellows’ research and international dissemination.
GCP is a member of The Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), which demonstrates its commitment to high standards in academic and professional publishing. All printed books are submitted to the UK’s legal deposit libraries, ensuring long-term preservation and academic recognition.
GCP is also a Crossref member with the authority to assign DOIs to all its published materials, including academic journals and articles, as well as books and individual chapters. This ensures that its publications are permanently identifiable, easily discoverable, and widely citable in the global academic community.
GCP publishes three distinctive academic journals—Journal of China in Global and Comparative Perspectives (English), Journal of Chinese for Social Science (Chinese) and Journal of Corpus Approaches to Chinese Social Science (Chinese and English)––and Global China Dialogue Proceedings (English and Chinese). These journals focus on global China studies, comparative research, Chinese social science methodologies, and transcultural dialogue, with Fellows forming the core editorial and author community.
Since 2014, GCP has developed eight thematic book series—’Chinese Concepts’, ‘Chinese Discourse’, ‘Understanding China and the World’, ‘China and the Chinese in Comparative Perspectives’, ‘Globalization of Chinese Social Sciences’, ‘Transcultural Experiences with “Three Eyes”’, ‘China Urbanization Studies’ and ‘Cutting Edge and Frontiers’. These series, guided or authored by Fellows and research teams, provide a structured, theory-rich, and globally relevant knowledge system.
Transcultual and dual language publishing
GCP’s concept of transcultural publishing is a knowledge-building project that goes beyond ordinary bilingual publishing. Traditional bilingual publishing typically presents content in two languages—either through separate Chinese/English editions or by including both languages within the same volume—with limited structural correspondence or scholarly alignment. Dual-language publishing goes a step further by presenting Chinese and English in a structurally aligned way within the same publication—ensuring synchronized terminology, concept mapping, logical parallelism, and cross-language verification.
Transcultural publishing, in turn, builds upon dual-language methods. It emphasizes the integration of language, culture, and knowledge systems, enabling readers from different cultural backgrounds to interpret the same content through their own cognitive frameworks. Through dual placement, annotation systems, conceptual clarification, and contextual explanation, transcultural publishing enables genuine cross-cultural knowledge exchange.
In this hierarchy, bilingualism is a foundational capability, dual language is a technical method, and transcultural publishing is the highest academic pursuit—representing GCP’s most original and strategically significant contribution to global knowledge production.
Example of GCP house style (the English display of Chinese personal and related names)
In 2011, The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of the People’s Republic of China and the Standardization Administration of China jointly issued the Rules for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Spelling of Chinese Names (GB/T 38039–2011)[1]. Over the past decade, some of these rules have been challenged in actual usage. Based on our editorial experience in presenting Chinese personal names in English–Chinese dual language publications, GCP has made necessary adjustments while adhering to the above rules, and has formulated its own system for the English display of Chinese names.[2]
(1) Structure and cultural background of Chinese surnames. In general, Chinese surnames or family names consist of single-character surnames (e.g. Zhao 赵, Qian 钱, Sun 孙, Li 李) or compound surnames (e.g. Ouyang 欧阳, Sima 司马), and occasionally double surnames (e.g. Ouyangchen 欧阳陈). In addition, after the implementation of China’s one-child policy in the 1980s, some children adopted a combination of both parents’ surnames, forming new compound surnames. This practice is often linked to cultural notions of ‘continuing the family line.’ For example, combining the father’s surname Zhang 张 and the mother’s surname Yang 杨 produces ‘Zhangyang 张杨,’ giving rise to names such as ZHANGYANG Xing 张杨兴 with a ‘long surname and short given name’ structure, or ZHAOQIAN Duoduo 赵钱多多, a name that conveys cultural imagery through the use of a double surname.
(2) Structure and cultural significance of Chinese given names. Chinese personal names generally follow the ‘surname first, given name after’ structure. Surnames are usually short, and given names typically consist of two characters. Some names are linked with a hyphen, such as WANG Laowu 王老五 or WANG Lao-wu 王老五. The visual characteristic of ‘short surname, long given name’ helps international readers identify the structure of a Chinese name. With the revival of traditional culture, some parents incorporate elements based on the Five Phases (wuxing 五行) or other principles into the given name, for example, ZHANG Zelinli 张泽琳坜 contains elements symbolising water, wood and earth. It should be noted that with the increasing use of compound and double surnames, more variations in the visual structure of Chinese names have emerged, no longer limited to the traditional ‘short surname, long given name’ form.
(3) Two approaches to the pinyin or English display of Chinese names. One approach uses all capital letters for the surname and initial capitals for each syllable of the given name, with subsequent letters in lower case, e.g. ZHANG San 张三, WANG Laowu 王老五. GCP adopts this approach for the names of all Chinese people from mainland China. Overseas, in order to maintain continuity of identity across different cultural environments, some Chinese retain their original Chinese name as their first name, or add an English first name, and choose whether to keep their maiden surname or adopt a married surname as needed, e.g. Jone Smith/Wu 琼·史密斯/吴, Anne Li/Brown 安妮·李/布朗. This approach preserves the cultural markers of the Chinese name while facilitating recognition in Western contexts.
(4) Treatment of ancient figures, literary authors and pen names. GCP retains the traditional English renderings of ancient philosophers and literary figures, such as Confucius for 孔子, Mencius for 孟子, and Li Po for 李白. For ancient literary authors, however, modern pinyin is generally preferred, such as LI Bai 李白 for Li Po 李白and LI Qingzhao for 李清照. Pen names are presented according to the form consistently used by the author, such as XUE MO 雪漠, Xue Mo or Xuemo/xuemo for the writer Xuemuo; GCP adopts the appropriate form based on the context.
(5) Another convention based on international usage. For widely recognised political leaders, public figures or names long familiar to international readers, GCP adopts the conventional established spellings, such as Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 and Zhang Yimou 张艺谋. These spellings have become widely accepted international standards and are increasingly common in Western literature, and GCP follows this practice.
(6) Standard display of overseas Chinese names in English. For practical reasons, overseas Chinese typically adopt the Western name order, placing the surname last, e.g. Laowu Wang 老五王. Some add an English first name before the Chinese given name, such as Martin Laowu Wang 马丁·老五王, or abbreviate the Chinese given name to an initial, such as Martin L. Wang 马丁·L. 王. Although these forms may look or sound unfamiliar when translated back into Chinese, they are easier to recognise in English-language contexts while still preserving cultural origin.
(7) Special cases in the English display of overseas Chinese names. In the international academic community, there is another special case in which some Chinese scholars’ English names appear in the Western order ‘given name first, surname last’, such as Li Wei 李嵬. It should be noted that such spellings typically arise not from the individual’s intentional adoption of a Western-style name (such as Wei Li), but from the long-term citation, indexing and dissemination of their names in this format within international academic settings, eventually becoming a stable signature form. Because Western systems generally assume the final element to be the surname, such scholars are often addressed as ‘Professor Wei’. This usage differs from the GCP approach for authors who actively adopt Western name order (e.g. Wei Li) and is instead closer to a conventional or ‘academic pen-name–like’ form. Out of respect for the established academic identity of such authors, GCP will adopt this format when necessary and will provide clarification on its first occurrence to avoid misunderstanding.
(8) Parallel presentation of other naming systems.1) Wade–Giles[3] and modern pinyin in parallel: For example, Fei Hsiao-tung for 费孝通 is displayed on first occurrence as Fei Xiaotong / Fei Hsiao-tung; 2) Coexistence of dialect names and English names: Overseas Chinese not originally from mainland China often have names influenced by dialect pronunciations and may also have English names. For example, Ambrose King or Ambrose Yeo-Chi King is commonly used for 金耀基, though Jin Yaoji or Yaoji Jin may also appear. GCP aims to list these forms in parallel on first occurrence; 3) Korean and Japanese names: Korean and Japanese names are presented according to international conventions, for example: KOO Hagen or Hagen Koo 具海根, KIM Kwangok or Kwangok Kim 金光亿; FUKUTAKE Tadashi or Tadashi Fukutake 福武直, YAMA Yoshiyuki or Yoshiyuki Yama 山泰幸.
In summary, personal names are not merely linguistic structures; they also embody culture, history, family traditions and cultural or transcultural identity. GCP seeks to present names clearly and openly so that readers from different cultural backgrounds can understand these variations and their underlying meanings. In GCP’s English-language publications, names presented with the surname first and in full capitals generally indicate that the person is from mainland China, while surnames placed last usually indicate overseas Chinese or international convention. However, name choice is fundamentally a cultural practice and allows flexibility. GCP, while maintaining consistency of style, aims to respect to the greatest extent possible the author’s cultural identity, transcultural life experience and long-standing academic signature practices.
The above content is excerpted from the GCP House Style Guide. The Guide provides a full explanation of GCP’s bilingual style and rules. For details, please visit: https://globalcenturypress.com/house-style-guide
Future vision
The triadic framework of ‘fellowship system—transcultural dialogue—dual-language publishing’, jointly developed by the Global China Academy (GCA) and Global Century Press (GCP), represents our long-term commitment to global knowledge governance. Over the past decade, the continually evolving knowledge community, dialogue mechanisms, and publishing norms have likewise accumulated institutional strength, becoming an essential foundation for sustained transcultural scholarly collaboration. As an embedded mechanism of knowledge production and governance, the fellowship system not only institutionalises cross-disciplinary and transcultural judgement, but also nurtures collective identity and intellectual cohesion through long-term practice. It enables Fellows to gain a sense of honour, recognition, belonging and pride through transcultural peer review, agenda-setting, and collaborative research, while continuously deepening scholarship on China within global and comparative perspectives and generating theoretical insights with international explanatory power.
As the fellowship network expands, transdisciplinary capacities grow, and the transcultural publishing system continues to deepen, this triadic structure will further develop, strengthened by international collaboration and cross-sector engagement. Looking ahead, the Global China Academy will continue to uphold academic independence, transcultural connectivity and a strong public mission, working together with scholars, institutions, and partners around the world to foster deeper mutual understanding, more transformative forms of cooperation, and collective participation in shaping a more inclusive, open, and forward-looking global knowledge future.
[1] See: http://sxqx.alljournal.cn/uploadfile/sxqx/20171130/GBT28039-2011中国人名汉语拼音字母拼写规则.pdf.
[2] All Chinese personal names are presented in pinyin rather than italics, and the same applies to place names, for example: 北京 or 上海 (Beijing, Shanghai).
[3] See: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/威妥瑪拼音。
Note: Based on Section 10 of the Handbook for the 10th Global China Dialogue (slightly updated), 5 December 2025.
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