The short version
Your internships in China are often the strongest thing on your CV and the hardest part for a London screener to read. They use employer names as a shortcut: a name they know means someone else already ran a competitive process on you. A name they don't know is just a word. So a placement that was harder to get than most London ones can read like a local summer job.
The fix is small. Add one clause that tells them what the firm is, keep the three or four internships where you did the most, and write each one as what you did, not what the team did.
Tell them what the firm is
One short clause, inside the line, not a whole sentence:
CITIC Securities (China's largest investment bank by revenue)
China International Capital Corporation, CICC (leading Chinese investment bank)
Meituan (NASDAQ-listed, around 700m annual users)
Pick whichever of these a London reader will understand fastest:
- A comparison to a firm they know, if it's genuinely close
- Market position, like "largest by revenue" or "top three by assets"
- A listing, like "HKEX-listed" or "Fortune Global 500"
- How selective the placement was, like "1 of 8 interns from 3,000+ applicants"
The last one is often the best. It speaks directly to what a screener is judging, which is whether you've already beaten other people to get somewhere.
Firms you don't need to explain
Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, ByteDance, Xiaomi, BYD, Lenovo, Bank of China, ICBC, the Big 4 China offices and the Chinese arms of global banks are all known in London. Explaining them reads the same way as explaining Tsinghua.
Places, too
"Shanghai, China" is fine. A city a London reader has never heard of isn't, so give the province or the nearest major city instead.
Six short internships is too many
Chinese undergraduates often have six to nine internships, many of them remote, part-time or a few weeks long. At home, volume counts. In London, a wall of short, similar roles reads as unfocused, and it buries the one where you did real work.
Keep the three or four where you owned something. Make the dates show how long each one ran. Then put the rest on one line at the end of the section:
Additional internships: [Firm] (equity research), [Firm] (strategy), [Firm] (operations), 2024–25
One internship where you built a piece of analysis that got used beats four where you formatted slides.
Write what you did, not what the team did
This is the biggest change for most Chinese students, and it isn't about your English. A Chinese 简历 is a record of positions held and duties carried out. A UK banking or consulting CV is an argument about what happened because of you. Neither is wrong. They're different formats, and you're writing for the second one.
| What I see | What to write instead |
|---|---|
| Participated in a project to… | Name the part you built or decided |
| Assisted the team with… | Say which piece you owned |
| Under the guidance of Professor X… | Drop the supervisor. Give the method and what you found |
| Was responsible for… | Use the actual verb, then the result |
| We developed… | Which part was yours? |
Students often tell me the rewritten version feels boastful. It makes the same claim, more accurately. The original under-reported what you did, and a UK reader takes "assisted" at face value, so they'll assume your part was small.
Translate the titles, not the words
| On a Chinese CV | Don't write | Write |
|---|---|---|
| 实习 | Practice | Internship |
| 行研实习 | Industry research practice | Equity Research Intern |
| 部长 | Minister | Head of [team] |
| 学生会主席 | Chairman of the Student Union | President, Students' Union |
| 社会实践 | Social practice | Community project or field research |
Add the size wherever you can: "President, Students' Union (elected, 12,000 members)".
Money and dates
万 is 10,000 and 亿 is 100 million. 500万 is 5 million, not 500 million. Getting this wrong by a factor of 100 is more common than you'd think, and it will come up in an interview.
Give RMB with a rough sterling figure: "RMB 8m (~£880k)". The "~" stops anyone checking your exchange rate. Write dates as "Jun 2025 – Aug 2025", not "2025.06-2025.08".
The review shows you how each internship reads to a London screener, and every comment quotes the line it's about.