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Global citizenship education (GCE), an educational advocacy for students to attain the competencies of being aware of and actively engaged in defending social justice, equity and sustainable development at both local and global levels, is difficult to achieve in practice. The failure can be attributed to inadequate knowledge of different effects of GCE when it is used to meet specific needs of local schools. Identifying local schools’ needs for GCE may help educators put GCE to good use. However, few studies explore and justify the role of a local insight in assisting in GCE implementation, especially regarding the situation in China where inconsistencies are found across curriculum documents, research and educational practices. The present study fills the gap by investigating the schools’ needs for GCE at secondary level within the Chinese education system. With the assistance of principals (n = 6) and teachers (n = 10) from six participating schools in an anonymous city in Jiangsu province, data were collected through semi-structured interviews and then analysed abductively using the grounded theory approach. Analysis was initially framed by employing criteria from a curriculum development method, namely situational analysis, based on which further analysis was conducted to synthesise more abstract themes. As a result, four general conditions emerged from the data, including three restrictive conditions that may prevent GCE integration (i.e. ‘compliance and commitment’, ‘social mobility’ and ‘administrative constraints’) and one condition that can encourage GCE implementation (i.e. ‘competency-based education’). Since GCE is a complex idea linked to many possible applications, the four key conditions revealed from the small sample in the present study can enrich researchers’ understanding of the potentiality of GCE implementation in similar moderately developed cities on the east coast of China.