<p>Group supervision has increasingly become a common practice in doctoral education, generating extensive discussions worldwide. However, group supervision encompasses various meanings and refers to different practices in different contexts. Extending beyond the traditional focuses on intellectual synergy, formal arrangements, and pedagogical demands, this paper examines the significance of contextual factors, including national, educational, and disciplinary contexts, in shaping the structures and practices of group supervision. To showcase how group supervision is shaped by its context, we examined it in Chinese doctoral education within STEM laboratory settings, interviewing 33 doctoral students from eleven Chinese universities across 16 STEM disciplines. Our findings indicate that group supervision in Chinese laboratories functions as an interdependent, resource-based apprenticeship characterised by hierarchical relationships among supervisors and candidates. Research training within the laboratory is often resource-based. In particular, acting as the laboratory’s principal investigator (PI), the principal supervisor possesses key resources, including funding, research projects, and experimental facilities. Co-supervisors, typically early-career researchers working in the laboratory group, leverage these resources to secure their own research projects and enhance their publication records. In exchange for access to the principal supervisor’s resources, co-supervisors guide the principal supervisor’s doctoral students, typically without an official supervisory title. Our findings also reveal both the benefits and challenges that such resource-based group supervision presents for candidates, co-supervisors, and principal supervisors. We hope this study illustrates the importance of contextualising discussions on group supervision, inspires targeted insights for improving group supervision policies, and benefits future comparative studies across national contexts.</p>