Xiamen University

XMU, established in 1921, has long been listed among China’s leading universities on the national 211 Project, 985 Project and Double First-Class Initiative.

XMU has been named as a Double First-Class University with 6 subject areas supported under the World Class Disciplines initiative through the China Ministry of Education: Chemistry, Marine Science, Biology, Ecology, Statistics, and Pedagogy.

With a graduate school, six academic divisions consisting of 33 schools and colleges, and 16 research institutes, XMU boasts a total enrollment of nearly 44,000 full-time students with over 20,000 undergraduates, 18,000 graduate students toward a master’s degree and 5,000 doctoral candidates.

XMU currently has a faculty of over 3,000 full-time teachers and researchers, of whom 32 are the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences or of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

XMU has two campuses: Xiamen and Malaysia.

Established in 2014, Xiamen University Malaysia (XMUM) is the first overseas campus set up by a renowned Chinese university and the first Chinese university branch campus in Malaysia. With its first intake of students in February 2016, XMUM now has a student enrolment of over 6,000 students from 33 countries and regions.

The Cardiff Confucius Institute (CCI) was formally launched in 2008. It is a partnership between Xiamen University (XMU) and Cardiff University.

CCI exists to provide high quality language teaching and to strengthen links between Cardiff University and XMU to the benefit of both communities, and more broadly, both peoples.

Find out more about the Cardiff Confucius Institute (CCI).

The cities of Cardiff and Xiamen have been twinned since 1983 and there continues to be active links between both cities.

Xiamen is a coastal city in Fujian province in China.

12 October 2023 marked the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the twin-city relations between Cardiff and Xiamen.

Twinning cities are established to promote cultural and commercial ties between cities in different countries and, in 1983, Cardiff was the first city in the UK to twin with a Chinese city. Since then, many other twinning relations with Chinese cities followed suit across the UK.

Since the 1980s, creating twinning partnerships with Chinese cities has predominantly been a means to develop economic relations. However, for Cardiff and Xiamen, great importance and value have always been given to educational and cultural collaborations.

The establishment, in 2008, of the Cardiff Confucius Institute is one example of the dynamism of the twin cities and, of the strong partnership between Cardiff University and Xiamen University. Many students and local communities have benefited from the cultural and educational exchanges, as well as the teaching of Chinese language and culture through the Institute.

Partnerships between Xiamen Foreign Language School and Cardiff and Vale College; the Xiamen Music School and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama are other examples of this dynamism.