Abstract: Graph convolutional models have gained impressive successes on skeleton based human action recognition task. As graph convolution is a local operation, it cannot fully investigate non-local joints that could be vital to recognizing the action. For example, actions like typing and clapping request the cooperation of two hands, which are distant from each other in a human skeleton graph. Multiple graph convolutional layers thus tend to be stacked together to increase receptive field, which brings in computational inefficiency and optimization difficulty. But there is still no guarantee that distant joints (e.g. two hands) can be well integrated. In this paper, we propose a context aware graph convolutional network (CA-GCN). Besides the computation of localized graph convolution, CA-GCN considers a context term for each vertex by integrating information of all other vertices. Long range dependencies among joints are thus naturally integrated in context information, which then eliminates the need of stacking multiple layers to enlarge receptive field and greatly simplifies the network. Moreover, we further propose an advanced CA-GCN, in which asymmetric relevance measurement and higher level representation are utilized to compute context information for more flexibility and better performance. Besides the joint features, our CA-GCN could also be extended to handle graphs with edge (limb) features. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the importance of context information and the effectiveness of the proposed CA-GCN in skeleton based action recognition.