Lishui University is a regional public comprehensive university which offers undergraduate education at the moment. The university was established in May, 2004 with the approval of the State Ministry of Education of China on the basis of Lishui Teachers’ College and Lishui Vocational & Technical College. Though a newly established university, its history can be traced back to Chuzhou Teachers’ School for training elementary school teachers founded in 1907 by Mr. SUN Yirang, a master of Chinese culture of the late Qing dynasty. So the institution has over a century’s experience. The young university’s ambition is to develop itself into one of China’s top-notch local universities with its own distinctive characteristics among those established in the 21st century and begin to offer master education in 5 years’ time. It successfully received the Undergraduate Education Quality Review by the State Ministry of Education of China in May, 2010.
Situated in a leafy surrounding, Lishui University covers a total area of over 65 hectares of parkland with a total building area of over 320,000 square meters. Its library boasts a collection of 1.48 million volume books and over 2,000 periodicals. In addition, it has a collection of 636,000 e-books and more than 2.4 million master theses and doctorate dissertations. Up to now, 22 various laboratories and training centers have been established on campus.
Currently, Lishui University has 8 faculties: engineering, ecology, teacher education, business, nationalities, medicine and health，Chinese celadon and overseas Chinese studies. The university also has a college of continuing and vocational education. The university offers altogether 46 bachelor’s degree programs falling within diverse disciplines including economics, laws, education, literature, engineering, agronomy, management, medicine and so on to nearly 13,000 full-time students. It has a total number of 1,089 teaching, research and supporting staff, among which 693 are full-time teachers. By strict review and assessment, 5 disciplines of the university have been honored as provincial top disciplines, 1 speciality has been named provincial preponderant speciality and 4 specialities provincial emerging specialities with their own distinctive characteristics. The university also has one provincial key laboratory of engineering and one provincial service platform for sci-tech innovation .
In recent years, the teachers and researchers of Lishui University have led more than 30 state-funded research projects, including 1 National Key Technology Support Program of China, over 30 projects respectively supported by the State Natural or Social Science Foundation of China and more than 200 province-funded research projects.
With leading and facilitating local economic transformation and local social and cultural development as its mission, Lishui University has always been committing itself to interacting closely with community. The university has achieved a lot in recent years in the protection and inheritance of local cultural heritages, the utilization of local biological resources, and the preservation of local ecological environment.
To meet the challenge posed by the trend of the internationalization of global higher education, Lishui University has been dedicated to seeking partnership and collaboration with universities across the world in recent years, so that the global horizon of both its students and faculty members can be broadened. The university has established a joint double degree program in nursing science with its cooperation with Gävle University, Sweden, and partnership has also been established with universities of the U.S, South Korea and China’s Taiwan province. All these efforts resulted in the coming of international students from other parts of the world and have greatly promoted the international mobility of its own teachers and students.
