University of Electronic Science and Technology of China - History

History

In 1956, under the instruction of Premier Zhou Enlai, the inception of Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering ushered in the first higher education institution of electronic and information science and technology of China. CIRE was then created from the combination of electronics-allied divisions of three well-established universities: Shanghai Jiaotong University, Southeast University (the then Nanjing Institute of Technology) and South China University of Technology. As early as the 1960s, it was ranked as one of the nation's Key Higher Education Institutions. In 1997, UESTC was included in the first group of universities in the “211 Project”, a national program for advancing China's higher education. In September 2001, UESTC was selected as one of the 39 elite research-intensive universities in China that gain special funding under "Project 985".

Today, UESTC has developed into a multidisciplinary university directly reporting to the Ministry of Education, which has electronic information science and technology as its nucleus, engineering as its major field, and incorporates nature science, management, economics and liberal arts. UESTC has more than 3,000 faculty members, of whom 7 are academicians of CAS & CAE, 196 Ph.D. advisors, 325 full professors and 483 associate professors. It has an enrollment of 26,000 students, including about 10,000 Ph.D. and M.S. candidates. Since its foundation in 1956, UESTC has trained more than 100,000 graduates.