Peking University

What it is

Peking University is a Chinese university whose official website dates its founding to 1898 ^[2]. Universities are institutions that do two things at once: they teach students at several levels, and they host research. The university's own pages on itself reflect both sides, listing students, teachers, admissions programmes, library holdings, and the national academies its members belong to ^[2].

Which numbers an institution chooses to put in front of a reader is itself informative: here the emphasis falls on sheer size, on the range of levels at which students are admitted, on a large library, and on recognition by national academies ^[2].

The figures it reports

The statistics on that page are dated January 2026, so they are a snapshot rather than a permanent description ^[2]. The university gives 53,946 full-time students ^[2]. It splits them into 19,444 undergraduates and 34,502 graduate students, which means the graduate population is the larger of the two ^[2]. Within the student body it counts 2,541 international students ^[2]. The teaching staff is given as 3,887 ^[2]. Admissions are organised into 182 undergraduate admissions programmes and 349 doctoral admissions programmes ^[2]. The library holds more than 10 million volumes ^[2]. The university also counts 73 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering ^[2], the two national academies through which China recognises senior scientists and engineers.

Artificial intelligence

In September 2020 the university announced that Zhu Songchun would lead its Institute for Artificial Intelligence ^[1]. An announcement of this kind names the person who will run a research unit — in this case an institute devoted to artificial intelligence, a field that spans machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing and robotics. Institutes of this sort usually sit alongside, rather than replace, the departments that teach the subject, and their heads tend to be working researchers who also supervise students. Naming a head is the step by which a university turns the plan for an institute into an organisation with someone answerable for it, and it tells outside readers where that work will be coordinated.

How to read the numbers

Official statistics of this kind are useful if read with care. A count of programmes is not a count of students: one admissions programme can admit many people, and the same subject may appear at both undergraduate and doctoral level. Library holdings are usually counted in volumes, so a multi-volume work adds several to the total. A headcount of academy members describes recognition accumulated over a long career and says nothing about any single year's work. Definitions also vary — universities do not all count "international students" the same way, so comparisons need care. And because the page carries a date, every figure on it begins to age as soon as it is published. The lasting value of such a page is not that it pins the institution down exactly, but that it shows how the university chooses to describe itself and what it considers worth counting.

What the page does establish is scale: a university with tens of thousands of students, several thousand teachers, admission at both undergraduate and doctoral level, and a library in the millions of volumes ^[2]. Read next to the 2020 announcement of an institute for artificial intelligence ^[1], it suggests an institution that combines a long history with new research units — the older parts described by accumulated numbers, the newer ones by appointments still being made.