Shihezi University

Shihezi University (SHZU) is a public university in Shihezi, Xinjiang, China. Founded in 1996, it is affiliated with the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, and co-funded by the Ministry of Education and the Corps. The university is part of Project 211 and the Double First-Class Construction.

History
Shihezi University was officially formed in September 1996 with the merge of Shihezi Medical College (est. 1949), Shihezi Agricultural College (est. 1959), XPCC Vocational College of Economics (est. 1959), and XPCC Vocational College of Education (est. 1960).

Academics


Shihezi University offers 10 specialties—Agriculture, Medicine, Engineering, Economics and Trade, Management, Literature and Arts, Sciences, Education, Law, and History. It has 23 colleges, offering 10 doctorate degrees, 60 master's degrees, 97 bachelor's degrees, 1 pre-university senior middle school program, five specialties that enroll on-job-teachers for master's degrees, two post-doctoral scientific work stations, four post-doctoral mobile stations. The university has jointly set up graduate education bases with Peking University and Tianjin University, as well as a program for culture-oriented quality education.

The university has 11 disciplines: Ministry of Agriculture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC), three key laboratories co-constructed and supported by the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the XPCC. It has two key laboratories of XPCC, two key bases for art and scientific research, and 24 graduate schools and research centers. The university has become a key scientific research base of XPCC and XUAR.

Rankings and reputation
The Best Chinese Universities Ranking, also known as the "Shanghai Ranking", placed the university 138th in China and the 2nd best university in Xinjiang after Xinjiang University.

It was ranked 901-1000th globally by the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU).

Faculty and students
The university has 2,600 staff. There are 1,894 full-time teachers including two academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, 355 professors, 706 associate professors, 58 experts and scholars receiving outstanding achievement awards at national and provincial level, and 81 distinguished experts and scholars receiving special subsidies from the government. It employs more than 10 foreign experts and teachers every year.

Students come from 31 provinces and regions. The student population is currently 41,000, including 22,462 undergraduates, 6482 postgraduates and 415 international students from countries such as the United States, India, Russia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, etc.

Campus
The campus covers 1,802,000 square meters. It has 1,214,000 square meters of building, and the area of its laboratories is 184,100 square meters. The library has a collection of 3,000,000 Chinese and foreign books and periodicals, and is only one model project in Xinjiang, as university digital libraries in State High-tech Project 863. It has a book collection spot of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Location
The university is located in Shihezi, the Garden City, by the river of Manas on the northern foot of the Tianshan Mountains in Xinjiang.