List of universities in China


This article is a list of universities in China, which is defined as the People's Republic of China in mainland China and Hong Kong and Macau SARs.
By May 2017, there were 2,914 colleges and universities, with over 20 million students enrolled in mainland China. and 156 colleges in the ROC free area. More than 6 million Chinese students graduated from university in 2008. The "Project 211" for creating 100 universities began in the mid-1990s, and has merged more than 700 institutions of higher learning into about 300 universities. Corresponding with the merging of many public universities, has been the rapid expansion of the private sector in mainland China since 1999. Although private university enrollments are not clear, one report listed that in 2006 private universities accounted for around 6 percent, or about 1.3 million, of the 20 million students enrolled in formal higher education in China., the country has the world's second highest number of universities in the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy's top 500 universities.

List of universities by provincial-level divisions

Municipalities

Provinces

Autonomous regions

Special administrative regions

is the first formally established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 in Beijing as a replacement of the ancient Guozijian, the national central institute of learning in China's traditional educational system in the past thousands of years. Three years earlier, Sheng Xuanhuai submitted a memorial to Guangxu Emperor to request for approval to set up a modern higher education institution in Tianjin. After approval on 2 October 1895, Peiyang Western Study School was founded by him and American educator Charles Daniel Tenney and later developed to Peiyang University. In 1896, Sheng Xuanhuai delivered his new memorials to Guangxu Emperor to make a suggestion that two official modern higher education institutions should be established in Beijing/Tangshan and Shanghai. In the same year, he founded Nanyang Public School in Shanghai by an imperial edict issued by Guangxu Emperor. The institution initially included an elementary school, secondary school, college, and a normal school. Later the institution changed its name to Jiao Tong University. In the 1930s, the university often referred itself as "MIT in the East" due to its reputation of nurturing top engineers and scientists. In the 1950s, part of this university was moved to Xi'an, Shaanxi, and was established as Xi'an Jiaotong University; the part of the university remaining in Shanghai was renamed Shanghai Jiao Tong University. These two universities have developed independently since then, along with the original Beijing Jiaotong University.
Meanwhile, Wuhan University also claimed that its predecessor Ziqiang Institute was the first modern higher education institution in China. On 29 November 1893, Zhang Zhidong submitted his memorial to Guangxu Emperor to request for approval to set up an institution designed for training students specializing in foreign languages, mathematics, science, and business. After Ziqiang was founded in Wuchang, not only courses in foreign languages was taught, courses in science and business were also developed at the school. Later, although the school officially changed its name to Foreign Languages Institute in 1902, the school still offered courses in science and business. In China, there had been some earlier schools specializing in foreign languages learning, such as Schools of Combined Learning in Beijing, in Shanghai, and in Guangzhou, founded in 1864, but few provided courses in other fields, which hardly qualified as modern education institutions. Some argued that Wuhan University can only trace its history back to 1913 when the National Wuchang Higher Normal College was established, but Wuhan University officially recognized its establishment as in 1893, relying on the abundance of historical documentation and the experts' endorsement.
Besides, Tianjin University celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1995, which would predate the establishment of Peking University. Jiao Tong University followed in 1996. Other leading universities, such as Zhejiang University, Peking University, Shanxi University, Nanjing University, Fudan University, Tongji University and Tsinghua University also recently celebrated their hundredth anniversaries, one after another.
After the Chinese Civil War, parts of some famous universities of mainland China were transferred to the island of Taiwan: notably the National Central University and National Tsing Hua University. As a result, some universities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait share the same names. In the ROC-controlled Fujian, only one university, National Quemoy University was founded in 1997.
Remark:

People's Republic of China

C9 League, China's "Ivy League"

The C9 League is an alliance of nine most prestigious universities in mainland China, including Fudan University,
Harbin Institute of Technology,
Nanjing University,
Peking University,
Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
Tsinghua University,
University of Science and Technology of China,
Xi'an Jiaotong University,
and Zhejiang University. People's Daily, an official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, and others refer to the C9 League as China's Ivy League. These nine universities made up the C9 League in 2009. According to QS World University Rankings 2015/16, most of these C9 universities are considered as among the top 200 universities in the world.

Leading universities in mainland China (by geographical regions)

The Academic Ranking of World Universities 2018/19 and the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019/20 ranked most of the 39 universities in the Project 985 among the top 500 universities in the world and most of the universities in the Project 211 are ranked among the top 1000 universities worldwide.
This is a table of Project 985 institutions.
This is a table of Project 211 institutions.
China has a number of Sino-foreign cooperative universities, which are legally independent entities formed as joint ventures between Chinese universities and international partners. They include:

Rankings

Some established rankings in Wikipedia:
Other rankings in external links: