Xiamen University

Xiamen University was founded in 1921 by the well-known patriotic overseas Chinese leader Tan Kah Kee, the first university in China to be founded by an overseas Chinese. Xiamen University has a strong team of academic and administrative staff, making it possible to provide a full range of educational programmes. It is a key comprehensive university directly affiliated to the Ministry of Education of China, a first-class university with extensive international influence and is ranked in the top 20 of the over 2,000 universities and colleges in China. Xiamen University’s campuses lie on either side of Xiamen Bay, between the feet of green hills and the blue sea, and are recognized as one of the most beautiful campuses in the world. The university has a graduate school and 26 schools or colleges consisting of 66 departments, together with 10 research institutes. The university offers 83 undergraduate programmes, 276 master’s programmes, and 187 PhD programmes. Its first-class staff includes over 2,500 full-time academic and research staff, among which 23 are academicians of CAS and CAE. Currently, professors and researchers with doctorates obtained from overseas universities are playing an increasingly important role. The university now has a total enrolment of over 40,000 full-time students, including 20314 undergraduates, 17312 master’s candidates, 2956 doctoral candidates and over 2,700 international students, and students from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Xiamen University was one of the first institutions to develop overseas education, with the foundation of overseas correspondence education in the 1950s, followed by accepting overseas students with Chinese government scholarships from 1981 on. In all, the University has welcomed over 20,000 overseas correspondence students and over 10,000 foreign students from more than 100 countries. Xiamen University is among the first universities affiliated to Ministry of Education to accept Chinese Government Scholarship students and Confucius Scholarship students; meanwhile Fujian Government Scholarship and Xiamen University Scholarship have been established to fund more high-level exceptional international students to study here. Over recent years, with a global vision for education, Xiamen University plays an active role in regional and international academic cooperation. It has established co-operative ties with over 250 institutions of higher education both at home and abroad. Xiamen University has set up 15 Confucius Institutes around the world which play an important role in the international promotion of Chinese language and the cultural exchanges between China and the rest of the world.