Doing ethics without a ‘Map’: How Chinese researchers develop ethical awareness in research with children

• Ethical awareness in research with children in China is neither derived from normative frameworks nor fully capturable by procedural adaptation. • Ethical awareness emerges through moments of dissonance, affective hesitation and relational complexity. • Rather than focusing on compliance or certainty, this paper advocates for an understanding of ethics as situated awareness, a mode of engagement shaped by moral ambiguity, affective entanglements and structural constraint. This paper explores how researchers working with children in China navigate ethical challenges in the contexts of limited institutional guidance and the tension between global ethical principles and local moral expectations. Drawing on dialogic focus groups with 30 Chinese participants who have experience doing research with children, we conceptualise ethics not as compliance with rules but as an interplay of ethical awareness and practice shaped by affective, relational, and institutional conditions. Ethical awareness is theorised as a situated and relational capacity to recognise and respond to morally important moments under uncertainty. It develops through hesitation, discomfort and negotiation, particularly within ethical double binds between procedural frameworks and relational obligations. Rather than advancing a culturalist model, our paper offers a practice-based perspective that foregrounds ambiguity, moral complexity and the emotional labour of ethical decision-making. We argue for moving beyond universalist paradigms towards dialogic and context-sensitive approaches to research ethics. The paper concludes with implications for researchers, ethics committees and institutions seeking to foster reflexive and decolonising practices in cross-cultural qualitative inquiry.