JCN abstracts are now available in Chinese. This exciting and innovative project emerged from the Chinese Consortium for Higher Education in Nursing in cooperation with Wiley-Blackwell, the publishers of JCN. The consortium is a group of 59 university nursing schools in mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The purpose of the consortium is a platform for open communication and mutual encouragement in the field of higher nursing education. The consortium exist to improve the quality of nursing education and to meet international standards for the nursing profession in the 21st century. The project for translating the abstracts into Chinese has been led from the School of Nursing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong and, at the time of writing, all abstracts for 2007 and to date in 2008 have been translated, grouped under subject headings and mounted on the consortium website (http://www.chinesenursing.org). The project is continuing, with a team of translators, to keep the translation of abstracts up to date and to extend back, beyond 2007. Plans are underway to link the abstracts to the relevant papers online in Synergy and to provide a link to the consortium web pages from the JCN homepage (http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/jcn). Initially, the abstracts will only be available to members of the consortium in the first instance, but it is planned to make them more widely available. This is an historic development for JCN and one which enables a greater number of nurses in China to locate useful papers. It also extends and deepens the penetration of JCN into the most important and rapidly developing region of the world.