Shanghai International Studies University

Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) was founded in December 1949 as the first higher education institution for foreign languages established after the founding of the People’s Republic of China and one of the birthplaces of foreign language education in the new China. It is a national key university directly under the Ministry of Education and jointly supported by Shanghai, and participates in the national Project 211 and Double First-Class initiatives.

Upholding its motto, “Integrity, Vision and Academic Excellence across China and the World,” and its educational philosophy, “Interpreting the World, Embracing the Future,” SISU serves national development, people’s all-round growth, social progress, and people-to-people exchanges between China and other countries. It advances its Multilingual+ strategy and educational reforms centered on crossing boundaries, connecting and integrating, developing outstanding international talent who command languages, understand countries and excel in specialist fields. It is committed to becoming a world-class foreign studies university with distinctive strengths in country, regional and global knowledge.

Historical Heritage

SISU is the same age as the People’s Republic of China. Its predecessor was the Shanghai Russian School affiliated with East China People’s Revolutionary University. Its first president, Jiang Chunfang, was a renowned Russian translator, publisher and founder of China’s encyclopedia enterprise. It subsequently evolved through the Foreign Languages School affiliated with East China People’s Revolutionary University, Shanghai Russian College and Shanghai Foreign Languages Institute. In 1963, it was designated a national key university by the Ministry of Education. In 1985, the ministry approved its English name, Shanghai International Studies University, abbreviated SISU. Its Chinese name formally changed to Shanghai Waiguoyu Daxue in 1994.

A rich scholarly tradition has flourished here. Distinguished scholars and masters including Gu Xingqing, Ling Dayang, Li Jiaxiang, Xia Zhongyi, Fang Zhong, Xu Zhongnian, Wang Yansheng, Wang Jiyu, Xu Tianfu, Lin Dingsheng, Yan Qingxi, Yan Disheng, Yang Shoulin, Yue Yanglie, Yao Nan, Zhou Tuimi, Qi Zhusheng, Qian Weifan, Lu Peixian, Pu Yunnan, Zhang Zhenbang, Xu Baikang, Yang Xiaoshi, Xue Fankang, Li Guanyi, Wang Hong, Qi Yucun, Hu Menghao, Gu Bolin, Wang Dechun, Xu Xianxu, Yu Kuangfu, Hou Weirui and Xie Tianzhen have gathered here to teach and research, creating and enriching SISU’s humanities tradition.

Educational Strengths

Since its founding, SISU has maintained leading disciplinary strengths and high teaching quality. It ranks among China’s leading universities in international indicators such as the QS World University Rankings. In the Ministry of Education’s discipline and program evaluation, foreign languages and literatures received an A+ rating, tied for first nationwide.

SISU develops strategic languages to provide urgently needed specialist talent for national and local development and exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations. It now teaches 54 languages. These include 39 modern languages: Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Persian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Swedish, Dutch, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Turkish, Hindi, Hungarian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Polish, Czech, Swahili, Serbian, Romanian, Tajik, Belarusian, Urdu, Pashto, Malay, Javanese, Sundanese, Khmer, Bengali and Chinese. It also offers 15 courses in rare and specialized languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Esperanto, Sanskrit, Old English, Classical Syriac, Pahlavi, Classical Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya, Akkadian, Sumerian, Classical Hebrew, Ottoman Turkish, Gandhari in Kharosthi script, and sign language.

SISU has developed a distinctive, diverse disciplinary structure with strengths in languages and literature and coordinated development across 6 categories: literature, education, economics, management, law and engineering. It has 3 national key disciplines–English language and literature, Russian language and literature, and Arabic language and literature under cultivation–1 national undergraduate training base for less commonly taught languages covering Western European languages, 10 national distinctive program development sites, 29 national first-class undergraduate program development sites and 4 Shanghai provincial-level first-class undergraduate program development sites. Foreign languages and literatures is a national Double First-Class discipline. Six disciplines–foreign languages and literatures, political science, applied economics, education, journalism and communication, and business administration–are Shanghai university first-class disciplines, with foreign languages and literatures in Class A.

SISU is a signatory university to a cooperation memorandum with the United Nations and a partner of the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Interpretation. It is also a member of the International Permanent Conference of University Institutes of Translators and Interpreters (CIUTI). Its Graduate Institute of Interpretation and Translation is among Asia’s foremost institutions, offers all combinations of the UN’s 6 official languages, and has received the highest global rating from the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC).

Talent Development

SISU has a complete multilevel talent development system. Its 56 undergraduate programs cover 12 program groups, comprising 35 language and 21 non-language programs. It offers master’s degrees in 9 first-level disciplines–foreign languages and literatures, political science, applied economics, education, Chinese language and literature, journalism and communication, business administration, Marxist theory, and interdisciplinary area and country studies–covering 42 second-level master’s authorizations. Its 10 professional master’s degree categories are business administration, translation and interpreting, international Chinese language education, finance, law, international business, journalism and communication, public administration, digital economy and international affairs. Its 4 first-level doctoral disciplines are foreign languages and literatures, political science, business administration and interdisciplinary area and country studies, covering 22 second-level doctoral authorizations. It offers 2 professional doctoral categories, translation and interpreting and international Chinese language education, and 3 postdoctoral research stations in foreign languages and literatures, political science and business administration.

SISU actively serves the Belt and Road Initiative and the major strategy of promoting Chinese culture abroad. It pioneered the Multilingual+ strategy for outstanding international talent, innovates educational models and improves standards through substantive development. It cultivates generalists able to participate in global affairs and specialists knowledgeable about countries, regions and fields. Its training encompasses outstanding foreign language talent, high-level multilingual translators and interpreters, multilingual international journalism and communication professionals, innovative business administration talent without borders, international innovative talent in applied economics, foreign-related legal professionals and personnel for international organizations.

SISU has established joint education systems with Xinhua News Agency, China Daily, the UK’s Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), China Business Network (CBN), International Channel Shanghai (ICS) and other partners. It also implements a credit recognition plan among Yangtze River Delta universities. With the UK’s FutureLearn platform, it explores and practices massive open online courses (MOOCs), promoting deep integration of information technology with teaching and innovation in educational thinking.

Research Excellence

Drawing on its multilingual, interdisciplinary and intercultural strengths, SISU serves national strategic development and strategic communication. It preserves and highlights its traditional strengths in foreign languages and literatures and builds on growing fields including political science, business administration, and journalism and communication. It brings together high-level Chinese and overseas research teams, explores New Liberal Arts development, and creates a cluster of university academic think tanks through collaborative innovation. It enjoys a strong academic standing in language and literature, international relations, international communication, and area and country studies.

Its research infrastructure includes 1 platform jointly supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Education and Shanghai, the China-Arab Research Center on Reform and Development; 1 Ministry of Education key humanities and social sciences research base and Shanghai university think tank, the Middle East Studies Institute; 1 State Language Commission research base and national language think tank, the China Center for Language Planning and Policy Studies; 1 Shanghai key research base, the Institute of Global Governance and Area Studies; 1 research base jointly supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the China-Japan-Korea Cooperation Research Center; 3 Ministry of Education regional and country research bases, the European Union, Russian and British studies centers; and 20 registered Ministry of Education country and regional research centers. It also has 2 Chinese-foreign people-to-people exchange research bases of the Ministry of Education’s Department of International Cooperation and Exchanges, for China-UK and China-Germany exchanges; 1 base jointly supported by the ministry’s Education Management Information Center, the International Comparative Research Center for Educational Informatization; 1 Ministry of Education key laboratory, the Laboratory of Brain-Machine Collaborative Information Behavior; 2 Shanghai university key humanities and social sciences research bases, the G20 Research Center and Shanghai English Education and Teaching Research Base; and 2 Shanghai innovative social science research bases, for comparative research on Chinese and foreign cultural soft power and for area and country studies from a language-and-cultural-sphere perspective. With the Development Research Center of the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government, it also jointly operates a foreign cultural policy research base, and it is a branch institution of the Shanghai Social Survey and Research Center.

More than 100 SISU research institutions and academic organizations focus on global governance and area and country studies. They have developed channels for applying research results that closely connect government, industry, universities, research and users, providing intellectual support for national ministries and local governments in developing and implementing policy. They have produced landmark research achievements. The China-Arab Research Center on Reform and Development, established at General Secretary Xi Jinping’s personal initiative, has become an important intellectual platform for China and Arab countries to exchange experience in reform, opening-up and governance. Five SISU institutions have been selected as CTTI source think tanks: the Middle East Studies Institute, China Center for Global Public Opinion Research, China Center for Language Planning and Policy Studies, British Studies Center and Silk Road Strategy Institute.

Based on foreign language disciplines, SISU advances integration within the humanities and across the humanities, sciences and engineering. It has established the Institute of Corpus Studies and Applications, the Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Collaborative Information Behavior, an Applied Brain and Cognitive Science Laboratory, and a SISU-iFLYTEK interdisciplinary joint laboratory for interpreting and translation. These promote interdisciplinary research across linguistics, management, computer science and cognitive neuroscience and explore frontiers in data-driven language intelligence.

SISU edits and publishes 21 academic journals: Journal of Foreign Languages (Journal of Shanghai International Studies University), Foreign Language World, Technology Enhanced Foreign Language Education, Comparative Literature in China, International Review, British and American Literary Studies, Arab World Studies, Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in English, Chinese Journal of International Politics in English, Translation and Interpreting Studies in English, Foreign Language Testing and Teaching, Language Policy and Language Education, Research on French Language Teaching in China, New Silk Road Studies, Frontiers in Corpus Research, English Education and Teaching Studies, Language Teaching for Young Learners in English, Online Media and Global Communication in English, Intercultural Communication Studies in English, Corpus and Humanities Research in English, and the Journal of the International Association of Art Historians in English. Seven are included as Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) source journals or collected journals, and 8 English-language journals are distributed overseas. They enjoy strong academic reputations. SISU continues to promote overseas publication of Chinese academic journals and the translation and international dissemination of outstanding Chinese scholarship, strengthening academic influence and international discourse and supporting the flourishing of Chinese philosophy and social sciences.

International Outlook

SISU was among the first universities in the People’s Republic of China to undertake international exchanges, with foreign experts working at the institution from its earliest years. It treats internationalization as a core development strategy and has established partnerships with more than 440 universities, educational, cultural and research institutions, and international organizations in 62 countries and regions. It was among the first universities worldwide to sign cooperation framework agreements with UN headquarters and its branches, the European Commission and the European Parliament. It has joined international academic alliances including the International Consortium for Asian and African Studies, the China-UK Higher Education Humanities Alliance, the Sino-Russian Comprehensive University Alliance and the China-Japan Humanities Exchange University Alliance.

SISU encourages young students to develop a global outlook, grow in multicultural environments and learn from the achievements and advanced experience of higher education worldwide. The proportion of undergraduates undertaking overseas study visits reaches 50%. Every year, more than one thousand enrolled undergraduate and postgraduate students receive China Scholarship Council funding for academic exchange abroad or in other regions, or pursue cooperative degrees. Through its foreign expert and overseas expertise recruitment initiative, it builds an international faculty and promotes international research cooperation. More than 90% of faculty have overseas study experience, and over 230 foreign experts work at the university.

Drawing on long experience in teaching and research, SISU compiles and publishes various textbooks for teaching Chinese as a foreign language. Each year, approximately 3000 international students from around the world come to study Chinese and related degree programs, placing it among China’s leading institutions by scale. It has jointly established 8 Confucius Institutes with the University of Naples L’Orientale in Italy, Osaka Sangyo University in Japan, the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, the University of Szeged in Hungary, the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain, Hassan II University of Casablanca in Morocco, Samarkand State Institute of Foreign Languages in Uzbekistan and Aristotle University in Greece. It also operates an education center in Mexico. Spanning Asia, Africa, Europe and South America, these institutions promote Chinese culture and connect world civilizations.

Campus Facilities

Shanghai International Studies University has two campuses covering 74.7 hectares. Hongkou campus is in central Shanghai, adjoining Lu Xun Park and the Duolun Road area of modern Shanghai culture. Songjiang campus is in suburban Shanghai at the foot of Sheshan, the city’s highest point, near the Guangfulin archaeological site, known as Shanghai’s roots. The campuses share a cultural lineage while retaining their own characteristics.

SISU Library is one of the central libraries in the national consortium of foreign studies university libraries. It has two library buildings and more than ten specialist document rooms, including the Faisal Library. Its holdings include more than 1.3 million printed items in 65 languages, 1.74 million electronic books, 1385 Chinese and foreign printed newspapers and periodicals, over 1.22 million electronic periodical volumes, more than 2.72 million electronic theses and dissertations, and 85 electronic resource databases. Its digital scholarship service platform preserves and shares SISU scholars’ papers, books and other academic work over the long term. It also provides research and academic exchange services including data archiving, management, publication, retrieval, sharing, citation and statistical analysis.

SISU’s Museum of World Languages is China’s first museum of world languages, centered on global linguistic diversity. Guided by its founding concept, “Words, Worlds,” it provides public science education based on linguistics and related interdisciplinary fields. It preserves and protects intangible cultural heritage, builds a global language knowledge system, and promotes intercivilizational dialogue and people-to-people exchanges. It is a member of the Chinese Museums Association and the national university museum education alliance. SISU has advanced facilities, including world-class simultaneous interpreting systems and language laboratory equipment, and a substantial multimedia foreign language education resource collection.

Social Services

SISU has long taken responsibility for leading and advancing reform and development in China’s foreign language education and has consistently emphasized public scholarship and knowledge dissemination. Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, one of China’s largest and most authoritative foreign language publishing centers, is a national first-class publisher. It has published more than 10000 books, textbooks and electronic publications in over 40 languages, with total print runs exceeding 1 billion copies and a reprint rate at least 70%. In the Chinese Book Citation Index (CBKCI), it has repeatedly ranked first in foreign languages and literatures by the number of included book titles, giving it broad social influence. Shanghai Foreign Language Audio-Visual Publishing House/Shanghai Foreign Language Electronic Publishing House is China’s first specialist publisher of foreign language audio-visual and electronic materials. Its Love Future brand is well known in China and abroad and popular among language learners. The Shanghai Interpretation Accreditation (SIA) examination organized by the university has test centers in 32 cities nationwide and has trained and selected many interpreting professionals.

SISU participates in the Ministry of Education’s special university online culture development initiative and was among its first integrated educational media pilot institutions. It pioneered multilingual foreign-language portal sites and an integrated media center among Chinese universities, using multiple languages to tell China’s stories and the internet to communicate China’s voice. It innovates online education platforms, promotes the international reach of Chinese higher education and strengthens international communication capabilities, receiving dedicated written instructions from national leaders. Faculty and students also frequently participate in major international events, including high-level conferences, sporting events and artistic performances, demonstrating a spirit of volunteer service and applying their disciplinary expertise to provide professional multilingual services.

For more than seventy years, SISU faculty and students have served at the forefront of China’s opening-up, working around the globe and contributing to the country’s diplomacy, economic development, cultural prosperity and social progress, and to friendship between the Chinese people and people of other nations.

In the new era, SISU keeps major national priorities in mind. On its new journey toward a world-class foreign studies university, it has defined five points of orientation: a center for incubating outstanding Multilingual+ talent, a source of innovation in foreign languages and literatures, a key supplier of country, regional and global knowledge, a strategic support base for global discourse capabilities, and a demonstration leader in foreign language education reform and development.