FUDAN UNIVERSITY

Shanghai Fudan University was founded in 1905 and is considered one of China’s most prestigious and selective universities. Like Shanghai Jiaotong and Peking and Tsinghua universities in Beijing, Fudan is a member of China’s C9 league for China’s top nine universities. Fudan was ranked as China’s third best University in China in 2009, behind Peking and Tsinghua in Beijing.

Initially a private university, Fudan became the first university in China, after the foundation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, to have its status changed to public university under a Soviet-style model. As part of the remodelling, academic departments from ten other universities in Eastern China were annexed into Shanghai Fudan in an attempt to pool Eastern China’s top teaching talent under one roof. In 2000, Shanghai Fudan merged with the Shanghai Medical University.

As a result of its history and mergers, Shanghai Fudan offers a large range of undergraduate and graduate programs in both arts and sciences, and was one of the first universities in China to offer Mandarin language programs to foreigners, starting in the 1950s.