Tsinghua University - History

History

Since American Secretary of State John Hay suggested that the US $30 million plus Boxer indemnity paid to the United States was excessive, in 1909, President Roosevelt then obtained congressional approval to reduce the Qing Dynasty indemnity payment by US$10.8 million, on the condition that the said fund was to be used as scholarship for Chinese students to study in the United States. Using this fund, the Tsinghua College Chinese: 清華學堂(Qīnghuá Xuétáng) was established in Beijing, China, on 29 April 1911 on the site of a former royal garden belonging to a prince. It was first a preparatory school for students later sent by the government to study in the United States. The faculty members for sciences were recruited by the YMCA from the United States and its graduates transferred directly to American schools as juniors upon graduation. In 1925, the school established its College Department and started its research institute on Chinese Study.

In 1928, the authority officially changed its name to National Tsing Hua University (NTHU). During the Second World War in 1937, Tsinghua University along with Peking University and Nankai University, merged to form Changsha Temporary University in Changsha, and later National Southwestern Associated University in Kunming of Yunnan province. After the war, Tsinghua moved back to Beijing and resumed its operation.

After the communist revolution at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, which led to the creation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), Tsinghua University's then President Mei Yi-Qi, followed by many professors, fled to Taiwan where they established the National Tsing Hua Institute of Nuclear Technology in 1955, which later became National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan.

In 1952, the Chinese government regrouped the country's higher education institutions in an attempt to build a Soviet style system, with individual institutions tending to specialise in a certain field of study. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, many university students walked out of the classrooms, and some went on to be part of the Red Guards, resulting in the complete shut down of the university. Only until 1978 after the Cultural Revolution ended, the university began to take in students again. Even so, Tsinghua University remained in the top tier schools in China. In many years following this regroup, the school was commonly referred to as the "MIT of China", and today remains so. Since the 1980s, the university began to incorporate a multidisciplinary system. As a result, several schools were re-incorporated. These included the School of Sciences, School of Business and Management, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua Law School, School of Public Policy and Management, and the Academy of Arts and Design.