Peking University
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Peking University (PKU; Chinese: 北京大学; pinyin: Běijīng Dàxué), often abbreviated as Beida (北大), is a public research university in Beijing, China. Founded in 1898 during the late Qing dynasty as the Imperial University of Peking, it is the oldest modern national university in China and is consistently ranked alongside Tsinghua University as one of the country's top two institutions of higher learning. The university occupies the former campus of Yenching University in Haidian District, a site known for its classical Chinese gardens, Weiming Lake, and the Boya Pagoda. PKU is a major hub for artificial intelligence research in China, hosting the Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, the School of Computer Science, and labs that have produced notable open-source projects including ChatLaw, PKU-SafeRLHF, and the Open-Sora Plan.
| Founded | 1898 (as the Imperial University of Peking; opened December 31, 1898; anniversary observed December 17) |
| Type | Public research university |
| President | Gong Qihuang |
| Party Secretary | He Guangcai |
| Students | ~46,000 (full-time, 2024) |
| Undergraduates | ~16,400 |
| Postgraduates | ~29,700 |
| Faculty | ~3,400 academic staff; 115+ CAS/CAE academicians |
| Location | Haidian District, Beijing, China |
| Campus | Urban, 274 hectares (main campus); additional sites in Changping and Shenzhen |
| Motto (Chinese) | 爱国 进步 民主 科学 (Patriotism, Progress, Democracy, Science); also associated with Cai Yuanpei's 思想自由, 兼容并包 (Freedom of thought, all-inclusiveness) |
| Color | Red |
| Affiliations | C9 League, Project 985, Project 211, Double First Class |
| Website | pku.edu.cn |
PKU was established by imperial edict during the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, a brief modernization push led by reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao with the support of the Guangxu Emperor. On June 11, 1898, the emperor authorized the creation of the Imperial University of Peking (京师大学堂, Jīngshī Dàxuétáng). The institution formally opened on December 31, 1898 with William Alexander Parsons Martin, an American missionary and sinologist, as its first president. The school sat in central Beijing near Shatan, close to the imperial palace.
The Hundred Days' Reform collapsed within months when the Empress Dowager Cixi seized power in a coup on September 21, 1898 and rolled back most of the reform decrees. The Imperial University was one of the few reform-era institutions to survive, in part because it had already begun operating and because the imperial court still saw value in a modern training school for civil servants. It functioned during these early years as both China's first national comprehensive university and the highest education authority in the country, supervising the establishment of new schools across the empire.
Following the Xinhai Revolution and the founding of the Republic of China, the Ministry of Education in May 1912 ordered the school renamed Peking University (国立北京大学). Yan Fu, the translator of Thomas Huxley and Adam Smith into Chinese, served briefly as the first president under the new name. The defining figure of the early republican period, however, was Cai Yuanpei, who became chancellor in late 1916 and held the post (with interruptions) until 1926. Cai had studied in Germany and brought the model of academic freedom with him. He hired faculty across the political spectrum, including the liberal philosopher Hu Shih, the literary modernist Lu Xun, and Marxist intellectuals Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. His guiding phrase, 思想自由, 兼容并包 ("freedom of thought, all-inclusiveness"), still gets quoted as the spirit of the university.
Under Cai, PKU became the intellectual center of the New Culture Movement and the launching point of the May Fourth Movement. On the evening of May 3, 1919, after learning that the Beiyang government planned to sign the Treaty of Versailles ceding former German concessions in Shandong to Japan, students gathered in the PKU Third Auditorium and resolved to march. The next afternoon more than 4,000 students from PKU, Yenching University, and other Beijing schools assembled in front of Tiananmen, demanding that China refuse the treaty. Thirty-one students were arrested; one PKU student, Guo Qinguang, died from injuries sustained during the protest. The movement spread to cities across China and forced the Chinese delegation in Paris to refuse to sign on June 28, 1919.
With the Japanese invasion of north China in 1937, PKU evacuated south. Together with Tsinghua and Nankai, it formed the Changsha Provisional University and then, after a further retreat, the National Southwest Associated University (Lianda) in Kunming. Lianda operated under wartime conditions until 1946 and is remembered as one of the most academically productive periods in modern Chinese higher education. PKU returned to Beijing after Japan's defeat.
In 1952 the new People's Republic government reorganized China's higher education system on a Soviet model, breaking up comprehensive universities into specialized institutes. The arts and sciences faculties of Tsinghua and the recently nationalized Yenching University were merged into PKU, while PKU's engineering programs went to Tsinghua and its medical school became an independent institution (later reabsorbed in 2000 as the PKU Health Science Center). Most consequentially, PKU left its old central Beijing site and moved to the former Yenching campus in the northwestern suburbs, in what is now Haidian District. The Yan Yuan ("Yan Garden") campus, with its Weiming Lake and traditional pavilion architecture, has been PKU's main campus ever since.
PKU was at the center of the Cultural Revolution when, on May 25, 1966, philosophy lecturer Nie Yuanzi posted a big-character poster attacking the university administration. Mao Zedong called the poster "the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in China" and it helped trigger the wider movement. Classes were suspended; faculty were sent for re-education; and many scholars were persecuted. The university only resumed normal operations after 1977, when the national college entrance examination (gaokao) was restored.
The Deng Xiaoping reform period brought rapid recovery and international reopening. PKU was designated a national key university and was among the first nine institutions admitted to Project 211 (1995) and Project 985 (1998), the central government's two main programs for funding world-class universities. In 2017 it joined the Double First Class initiative.
The Shenzhen Graduate School opened in 2001, eventually growing into a full satellite campus that hosts PKU HSBC Business School and the School of AI for Science. In 2019 PKU established its Institute for Artificial Intelligence; in 2021 it spun off the School of Computer Science and the School of Integrated Circuits as standalone schools; and in September 2021 it opened a new Changping campus dedicated to engineering and applied sciences.
PKU groups its 55 schools and departments into six broad faculties (Sciences, Information and Engineering, Humanities, Social Sciences, Economics and Management, Health Science Center) plus a number of cross-cutting interdisciplinary institutes. The table below covers the schools that show up most often in AI research and English-language reporting; it is not exhaustive.
| School or college | Year established | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| School of Mathematical Sciences | 1913 (as the Mathematics Department) | One of the strongest math programs in China; alumni include Tian Gang and Yitang Zhang |
| School of Physics | 1913 | Birthplace of much of China's nuclear physics tradition |
| School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) | 2002 | Umbrella for electronics, communications, and the former CS department |
| School of Computer Science | October 24, 2021 | Spun off from EECS; traces back to a 1959 CS program in the Department of Radio Electronics |
| School of Integrated Circuits | July 2021 | Created in response to China's chip-self-sufficiency push |
| School of Intelligence Science and Technology | 2021 | Builds on a 1980s intelligence-science effort that began in 1985 |
| Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) | April 2019 | University-level institute, currently led by Zhu Songchun |
| Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology | 1983 (as the CS Research Institute) | Renamed in 2010 after Wang Xuan |
| College of Engineering | 2005 (re-established) | Reconstituted after the 1952 reorganization |
| Yuanpei College | 2007 (as a college) | Liberal arts honors program named after Cai Yuanpei |
| School of Software and Microelectronics (SSM) | 2002 | Located at the Daxing campus south of central Beijing |
| Health Science Center (PKUHSC) | 2000 (under PKU) | Successor to Beijing Medical University; includes the medical school and affiliated hospitals |
| PKU HSBC Business School (PHBS) | 2004 | Located in Shenzhen; AACSB, AMBA, and EQUIS accredited |
| Yenching Academy | 2014 | English-medium master's in China Studies; takes about 125 scholars per year |
| Guanghua School of Management | 1985 | One of China's leading business schools |
| School of AI for Science | 2024 | Based at the Shenzhen Graduate School |
The Yenching Academy of Peking University, opened in 2014, is a residential English-medium master's program in China Studies. The two-year degree is structured around six concentrations including economics and management, history and archaeology, literature and culture, philosophy and religion, politics and international relations, and law and society. Yenching Scholars receive full tuition, accommodation in the academy's residential college, and a monthly stipend. The program was patterned in part on the Rhodes Scholarship and is one of the larger sources of foreign graduate students at PKU.
PKU sits near the top of every major global ranking and trades the number-one mainland Chinese spot back and forth with Tsinghua University depending on the methodology and the year.
| Ranking | Year | Position |
|---|---|---|
| QS World University Rankings | 2026 | 14 (tied for first in mainland China) |
| QS World University Rankings | 2025 | 14 |
| Times Higher Education World University Rankings | 2026 | 13 |
| THE Asia University Rankings | 2026 | 2 (behind Tsinghua) |
| ARWU (ShanghaiRanking) | 2025 | 23 |
| THE World University Rankings by Subject (Computer Science) | 2026 | 10 |
| CSRankings (overall CS, all areas) | 2026 | 5 (tied with UIUC) |
| CSRankings (Artificial Intelligence area) | 2026 | 1 or 2 (sources differ; PKU is reported as either tied with or just behind Tsinghua) |
This is the part most relevant to AI Wiki readers, so it gets the most detail. PKU's AI work is spread across several units that grew out of different traditions: a long-running mathematics and computing department, a software-engineering school, an electronics and information faculty, and a newer cluster of dedicated AI institutes built up over the past decade.
The Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology (王选计算机研究所) is named after Wang Xuan, the PKU alumnus and academician who in the 1970s and 1980s led development of the Founder Chinese laser typesetting system, which transformed Chinese-language publishing and made bitmap font compression for thousands of CJK characters practical on early computers. Wang founded the original Computer Science Research Institute in 1983; it was renamed in his honor in 2010, four years after his death. The institute today works on natural language processing, multimedia computing, and computer graphics, and is one of the homes of PKU's NLP research.
The Institute for Artificial Intelligence (北京大学人工智能研究院) was set up in April 2019 as a university-level institute reporting directly to the PKU administration rather than sitting inside any one school. It is led by Zhu Songchun, who returned to China from UCLA in 2020 to take the post. The institute's stated approach contrasts what its director calls the dominant "big data, small tasks" Western paradigm with a "small data, big tasks" alternative grounded in cognitive science, developmental psychology, and a unified theory of intelligence Zhu has been pursuing since the 1990s.
The related School of Intelligence Science and Technology was reorganized as a degree-granting school around the same period and now offers undergraduate, master's, and doctoral programs in intelligence science.
BIGAI (北京通用人工智能研究院) is a non-profit research institute founded in 2020 and led by Zhu Songchun. It is closely affiliated with PKU and Tsinghua and shares faculty and students with the Institute for AI. BIGAI's flagship public project is Tong Tong (通通), announced in January 2024, which it described as an "AI child" agent designed to model behaviors and developmental stages of a three-to-four-year-old human. The institute's research style emphasizes embodied cognition, social common sense, and value alignment over scaling, which sets it apart from most of the high-profile Chinese LLM labs.
PKU's computer-science discipline goes back to 1959, when an early CS program was set up under the Department of Radio Electronics. It became a Department of Computer Science and Technology in 1978 and was folded into the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science when EECS was created in 2002. On October 24, 2021 it was promoted again, this time to a standalone School of Computer Science (信息科学技术学院 / 计算机学院). The school covers systems, theory, networking, security, AI, and HCI.
In the 2026 CSRankings, PKU placed fifth worldwide overall (tied with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and either first or second in the Artificial Intelligence area depending on the cut. PKU's machine-learning subfield alone published 165 papers across the CSRankings tracking window, the highest of any institution.
| Faculty member | Affiliation at PKU | Research area |
|---|---|---|
| Zhu Songchun | Dean, Institute for Artificial Intelligence; also director of BIGAI | Computer vision, statistical learning, cognitive AI, AGI |
| Tian Gang | Director, Beijing International Center for Mathematical Research | Differential geometry; member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences |
| Hao Dong | Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies | Embodied AI, robot learning, neuromorphic computing |
| Haifeng Zhang | Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies | Reinforcement learning, multi-agent systems, game theory |
| Yang Yaodong | Institute for Artificial Intelligence | Reinforcement learning, AI alignment, multi-agent systems |
| Lu Zongqing | School of Computer Science | Multi-agent reinforcement learning, networking |
| Zhang Shanghang | School of Computer Science | Computer vision, transfer learning |
| Xiaojun Wan | Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology | NLP, summarization, text generation |
| Ying Tan | School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science | Swarm intelligence, computational intelligence |
| Meng Li | Institute for AI; School of Integrated Circuits | Efficient ML, hardware-aware deep learning, privacy-preserving inference |
PKU labs have shipped a number of widely cited open-source releases. The most visible cluster comes from PKU-YuanGroup (the lab of Li Yuan at the Shenzhen Graduate School) and from the PKU-Alignment team.
PKU groups have been central to the Chinese open-source LLM ecosystem in two ways. First, several flagship Chinese-language fine-tunes (ChatLaw and Beaver in particular) trace back to PKU labs. Second, PKU-Alignment's safety datasets are now widely used by other Chinese labs, including teams at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), as a standard reference for alignment evaluation. PKU also collaborates with BAAI on shared research programs and faculty appointments.
| Name | Field | Connection to PKU |
|---|---|---|
| Tu Youyou | Medicine | 2015 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of artemisinin; PKU pharmacy graduate (1955) |
| Mo Yan | Literature | 2012 Nobel laureate in Literature; studied at PKU's literature program |
| Yitang Zhang | Mathematics | Mathematician who proved the existence of bounded gaps between primes; PKU math BS and MS |
| Tian Gang | Mathematics | Princeton professor emeritus and now PKU faculty; PKU undergrad |
| Robin Li (Li Yanhong) | Technology | Founder and CEO of Baidu; graduated from the Department of Information Management in 1991 |
| Li Keqiang | Politics | Premier of China 2013 to 2023; PKU LLB 1982, MA and PhD in economics |
| Bo Xilai | Politics | Former Chongqing Party Secretary; PKU history department |
| Yi Gang | Government | Former Governor of the People's Bank of China; long-time PKU economics professor |
| Hu Chunhua | Politics | Former Vice Premier of China |
| Sam Hou Fai | Politics | Chief Executive of Macao |
| Zhao Leji | Politics | Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress |
| Tang Jiaxuan | Diplomacy | Foreign Minister of China 1998 to 2003 |
| Qian Sanqiang | Science | Nuclear physicist; central figure in China's atomic-bomb program |
| Deng Jiaxian | Science | Nuclear physicist; principal designer of China's first atomic and hydrogen bombs |
| Ji Xianlin | Humanities | Linguist, Indologist, and former vice president of PKU |
| Hu Shih | Humanities | Philosopher and central figure of the New Culture Movement; faculty member |
| Lu Xun | Literature | Modernist writer; lectured at PKU under Cai Yuanpei |
| Chen Duxiu | Politics | Co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party; former PKU dean of humanities |
| Li Dazhao | Politics | Co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party; PKU library chief and faculty member |
The main campus, known as Yan Yuan (燕园, "Yan Garden"), occupies 274 hectares in Haidian District in northwest Beijing. The site sits on the grounds of several Qing-dynasty princely gardens, which were combined and developed by American Methodist missionaries to form Yenching University in the 1920s. The architecture is mostly grey-brick courtyard buildings with pitched tile roofs, designed by the American architect Henry Killam Murphy in a style sometimes called "Sino-Western collegiate."
The most photographed feature of the campus is Weiming Lake (未名湖, "Lake Without a Name"), a roughly oval lake at the heart of campus surrounded by walking paths, willow trees, and small pavilions. On its southern bank stands the Boya Pagoda (博雅塔), a 1924 thirteen-story imitation Liao-style brick pagoda that doubles as the campus water tower. The skyline of pagoda above lake ("一塔湖图," a Chinese pun that uses three characters meaning "a pagoda, a lake, a library" but sounds like "a city of pictures") is part of the campus identity.
Other landmarks include the PKU Library, the largest university library in Asia with around eight million holdings; the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology; the Museum of University History; and the Lakeview Building. The campus borders Yuanmingyuan (Old Summer Palace) to the north and the Tsinghua University campus to the east.
In addition to the Haidian main campus, PKU operates the Changping campus (opened 2021) for engineering and applied sciences, the Daxing campus for the School of Software and Microelectronics, the Health Science Center campus across central Beijing, and the Shenzhen Graduate School in University Town, Nanshan District.
PKU belongs to most of the major groupings of leading Chinese universities:
PKU has long-running collaborations with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and shares many academicians with it; over 115 PKU faculty members are CAS or Chinese Academy of Engineering academicians.