Over the past decade, I've worked a great deal with colleagues on sites in China. So I'm going to review the ways in which ‘integration' of Chinese records has created insight into the regional complex dynamics. The examples will include observing the drivers and mechanisms of local tipping points in lake trophic status, setting safe operating services for rural agriculture, and observing the growth of critical instability at a regional scale. I'll show the data for each case study but also highlight the conceptual developments and statistical techniques that we've used to tease out the complex system behaviours.