Tracing its origin back to Fujian Superior Normal School, founded in 1907, Fujian Normal University (FNU) is Fujian’s oldest university and one of China’s most time-honored teachers’ colleges. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the school, which by then had been renamed Fujian Provincial Normal College, merged in 1953 with such celebrated centers of learning as Fukian Christian University and Hua Nan Women’s College to form a new and significantly expanded Fujian Normal College, which acquired its current name of Fujian Normal University in 1972.
Located in Fuzhou, the capital city of Fujian province, the headquarters of FNU is made up of two campuses, the Qishan Campus and the Cangshan Campus, with a total land area of about 230 hectares. Right now, the University consists of 28 colleges, which together offer 56 undergraduate programs, over 120 master programs (including those conferring professional degrees in pedagogy, public administration, physical culture and arts), about 50 doctoral programs and 7 post-doctoral research centers. These programs cover subject areas in literature, history, philosophy, physics, engineering, pedagogy, economics, law, business management, agriculture, etc. A balanced and coordinated development of this wide spectrum of disciplines has given FNU a distinct identity as a multi-disciplinal comprehensive university. And by conferring a whole range of academic degrees, from bachelors to doctorates, these programs also enable FNU to set up a full-fledged educational system within its institutional framework.
In addition to regular academic programs, FNU has also been authorized by the State to provide on-the-job trainings for teachers of elementary, secondary, occupational schools as well as colleges. It has been singled out for setting up experimental pilot programs in distance education and in teaching Chinese as a foreign language. And it has been authorized to admit students from Taiwan on an experimental basis. Teaching, however, is just one aspect of the dual task which FNU has taken upon itself. To turn the University into a school oriented to both teaching and research, its faculty has been paying just as much attention to scientific investigations and scholarly pursuits. The efforts have started to pay off. The University is at present the proud host to as many as 4 national centers for scientific research and personnel training, 8 key laboratories or research centers sponsored by either the ministries concerned or the provincial government, one Ministry of Education sponsored research center for basic education, and several dozens of provincially sponsored laboratories and research institutes.
Over 20,000 students are currently enrolled in the two campuses in Fuzhou, among whom over 4,600 are pursuing their graduate degrees and some others are international students from 17 countries such as the U.S., the U.K., Japan, and the Republic of Korea, and from China’s Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan areas or from overseas Chinese families around the world.
FNU attaches the greatest importance to recruiting talented researchers and distinguished scholars for its teaching staff. Maintaining a high-quality, properly tiered, and professionally dedicated faculty has been its top priority. Right now, it has a 2,600-strong teaching and auxiliary staff. Its faculty counts more than 700 full and associate professors, among whom two have been elected members of the Eurasian Academy of Sciences, seven have received the honorific title of “Young and Middle-aged Experts with Distinguished Services,” two are members of the subject-specific advisory groups under the State Council Commission for Regulating Academic Degrees, six are “Professors Extraordinaire” or “Minjiang Scholars”, one has been honored as “China’s Distinguished Teacher”, six as “Fujian’s Distinguished Teachers,” and 22 as “Fujian’s Distinguished Experts”, to mention just a small fraction of the countless honors and recognitions won by FNU scholars.
The university is also noted for its fine facilities for teaching and research. Its library holds a collection of as many as 2.86 million books. Whereas the number marks it out as one of the largest libraries in normal universities throughout China, the library is famed internationally for its very impressive collections of ancient texts, rare books, rubbings of engraved tablets, photographs, calligraphic works and paintings, Fujian’s local cultural and historical documents, early editions of foreign language publications, and major newspapers published during the historic period known as the May Fourth Movement. The University is equipped with over 7,000 computers for teaching and research, over 100 multimedia classrooms, and more than 30 language laboratories. Among its facilities for conducting pedagogical and scientific experiments are a university computation center, an analyzing and testing center, a center of modern educational technologies, in addition to the 70-odd research institutes and centers run by different colleges. A high-speed intranet serves all its campuses, and it is expanding rapidly to cater to the ever-increasing needs of the university community.