Shandong University

Shandong Normal University was established in 1956 in Jinan, capital city of Shandong Province. It operates across two campuses and maintains a strong academic focus on teacher education and humanities, with additional programmes in social sciences, natural sciences, and management. The university integrates elements of Qilu cultural tradition into its teaching and research environment. Its library holds extensive collections, and it hosts multiple discipline-specific research centres. Student enrolment spans undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral levels across several schools and faculties.

Shandong Jianzhu University (SJU), founded in 1956, is in Jinan, the capital of Shandong Province and a historic cultural city. It has grown into an applied research university focused on engineering, especially civil engineering and architecture, with coordinated development across engineering, science, management, literature, law, agronomy, and art. The campus covers more than 160 hectares with about 700,000 square meters of buildings. There are 20 schools (departments), 64 undergraduate programs, 4 research (design) institutes, and over 26,800 full-time students. SJU is described as the only university in China designated to cultivate doctoral talent for green architecture to meet special national needs, and the only university in Shandong that has passed national professional evaluation (certification) for all civil engineering majors. It was the first undergraduate university in Shandong in the national industry–education integration demonstration project. ESI engineering ranks among the top 1% worldwide. Architecture and civil engineering are first-class disciplines in Shandong; architecture is listed as a high-level advantageous and characteristic discipline. Civil engineering, building environment and energy application, urban and rural planning, and water supply and sewerage engineering are provincial high-level application key construction majors. Architecture, civil engineering, electrical engineering and automation, and environmental design have been rated national characteristic majors. The university has strong research strength in new urbanization, building industrialization, green building, smart city, and ancient building fields )

Shandong University of Finance and Economics is a provincial university in Jinan, capital of Shandong Province, formed in 2011 through the merger of two earlier institutions founded in 1952 and 1986. It operates across four campuses and comprises 24 schools delivering 62 undergraduate, 73 graduate, and 9 doctoral programmes. The university hosts around 33,000 full-time students and employs over 1,900 academic staff, including more than 900 professors and associate professors. Its teaching and research focus strongly on economics, finance, management, and related social sciences, with 16 provincial-level key disciplines and several dedicated research bases in regional economic development, public finance, and service industry innovation. Faculty members hold national and provincial honours, including Taishan Scholar titles and recognition under national talent programmes. SDUFE maintains an open approach to academic collaboration, supporting domestic and international exchange as part of its institutional ethos.

It focuses on applied talent cultivation and offers bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs, with the right to recommend postgraduates exempt from admission examinations. Jinan is the provincial capital (“city of springs”), near Mount Tai and the Yellow River; Shandong is described as China’s third-largest economic province and the home of Confucianism. The university has four campuses covering over 2.43 million square meters, 26 schools, and 3 post-doctoral research centers. Disciplines include Economics, Law, Education, Literature, History, Science, Technology, Management, and Art. Six disciplines, including Chemistry and Material Science, are in the ESI top 1%. It has cooperative relationships with 120 international counterparts in countries including the US, UK, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Russia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. More than 4,000 international students have graduated from the university.

It was formed in June 2016 by merging Shanghai Lixin University of Commerce and Shanghai Finance University. Its roots go back to Lixin education founded by Dr. Pan Xulun in 1928. In 2022, the School of Business and Administration received five-year full AACSB accreditation. SLU has three campuses in Pudong, Songjiang, and Xuhui, covering more than 1,200 mu (about 800,000 square meters). It has more than 19,000 full-time students, including over 370 graduate students; 3 master’s degree programs and 40 undergraduate majors; more than 1,630 faculty and staff, including over 1,240 full-time teachers

Established in 1898 in Beijing, Peking University is China’s first national university. Its campus hosts five faculties—Humanities, Social Sciences, Sciences, Medicine, and Information and Engineering—alongside 47 colleges and departments. The university offers over one hundred undergraduate programmes and more than five hundred graduate and doctoral programmes. With around 34,000 students including nearly 2,400 international learners from 80 countries, its academic community is both large and diverse. The teaching staff includes over 5,800 full-time faculty members, among them more than 1,700 professors and over 60 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering. Research infrastructure includes 11 national key laboratories, 46 state key laboratories, and a library holding 7.7 million volumes—the largest university library in Asia.