Fudan University - Shanghai, China

Fudan University was founded in 1905, literally meaning ‘Heavenly light shines day after day’. In its long history it has achieved worldwide fame and is currently considered being within the top 5 universities in the whole of China.

It consists of seventeen schools (which comprise of sixty six departments) and four independent departments. It has about thirty six thousand enrolled students and almost one thousand seven hundred international students. Its main campus is located in downtown Shanghai with all modern campus services and amenities, and with all the advantages of being very close to the city centre.

Visiting students in the language and culture program at Fudan will be taking classes at the International Culture and Exchange School (ICES) according to their level of Mandarin. Depending on their level of Mandarin, students also have the option of enrolling directly into courses offered by Fudan to its Chinese student body.

Accreditation

Fudan University became one of the national elite universities after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Fudan is accredited by the Chinese Ministry of Education and is one of the top institutions of advanced learning and higher education in China.

In most academic rankings of Chinese universities, Fudan is ranked as the top university in Shanghai and among the top five in China.

Programs Hosted

Shanghai study abroad programs

Host City Description

Shanghai is the largest city in China in terms of population and one of the largest urban areas in the world, with over 20 million people in its extended metropolitan area.

Located on China's central eastern coast at the mouth of the Yangtze River it developed from a fishing and textiles town in the 19th century to a center of commerce between east and west, and became a multinational hub of finance and business by the 1930s. After the 1949 Communist takeover and the cessation of foreign investment, the city’s prosperity halted only to boom once more with intense development and financing after the 1990 economic reforms. In 2005 Shanghai became the world's largest port.

The city is an up-and-coming tourist destination well-known for its historical landmarks such as the Xintiandi and the Bund, its modern and ever-expanding Pudong skyline including the Oriental Pearl Tower, and its new reputation as a cosmopolitan center of culture and design. Today, the city is recognized as China's most important centre of commerce and finance, and is widely regarded as a future global city.

Because of Shanghai's status as the cultural and economic center of East Asia for the first half of the twentieth century, it is generally seen as the birthplace of everything considered modern in China. The city has also been the intellectual battleground between socialist writers who concentrated on critical realism and the more "bourgeois", more romantic and aesthetically inclined writers. Besides literature, Shanghai was also the birthplace of Chinese cinema & theater.

The city hosts several museums of national and regional importance, like the Shanghai Museum of Art and History, the Shanghai Art Museum, and the Shanghai Natural History Museum.  In addition, there are many smaller, specialized museums, some housed in important historical sites such as the site of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea and the site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China.

The city of Shanghai has hosted a number of world events, including the 2007 Summer Special Olympics and a Live Earth concert. The city will be the host of the Expo 2010 World's Fair between May and October 2010.

All in all, Shanghai combines the best that a modern global metropolis has to offer with the old-time, traditional flavor of a great Far East civilization.