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About Zhejiang International Studies University

Zhejiang International Studies University (ZISU) is a public provincial undergraduate university based on foreign languages and literature. The university was formerly known as Zhejiang Institute of Education (ZIE), which was founded in 1955 and started its general undergraduate education in 1994. In August 2018, the university successfully passed the qualified assessment of undergraduate teaching work by the Ministry of Education and entered a new historical period.

The university has 13 teaching institutions and 35 undergraduate majors, including 15 foreign language majors, with 13 foreign languages (English, Japanese, Spanish, French, Arabic, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, German, Czech, Turkish and Polish). Seven majors, including English, Primary Education, Arabic, Translation, Tourism Management, Russian and Business English, are national first-class undergraduate majors; seven majors, including International Business, Chinese International Education, Chinese Language and Literature, International Economics and Trade, Korean, Spanish and Exhibition Economics and Management, are provincial first-class undergraduate majors. Five disciplines, including foreign language and literature, Chinese language and literature, applied economics, business administration and chemistry, are provincial “13th Five-Year Plan” first-class discipline (B class) construction projects. The declaration of master’s degree is progressing steadily, and joint training of master’s students has been carried out with a number of universities.

The university features the cultivation of high quality applied talents with national sentiment and international vision who are well-rounded in moral, intellectual, physical and aesthetic development. In 2017, the university launched the “Young Students Learn from Young Xi Jinping” learning education, guiding students to learn, think, practice and understand from young Xi Jinping, learning from his unswerving ideals and beliefs, his patriotism for the people, his diligent spirit of learning and hard work. The school has achieved good results in the whole process of cultivating talents through the establishment of moral education. The University’s talent cultivation characteristics and quality have been recognized by the society, and the quality of student sources has been improving year by year, with the average employment rate of fresh undergraduate graduates reaching over 95% in recent years. More than 200 practical education bases have been built. Students have participated in various national and provincial competitions and achieved many successes. International volunteer service has been refined and integrated into the talent cultivation system, with a total of over 10,000 volunteer services in large-scale competitions and more than 400 honours.

The University has 542 full-time teachers, of whom 43.73% have associate titles or above, 57.01% have doctoral degrees, 48.89% have overseas training experience of six months or more, and more than 80% of teachers in foreign language disciplines have overseas study experience. There are three leading talents in philosophy and social sciences under the National “Ten Thousand People Plan”, three cultural masters and “Four Batches” of talents, one national candidate for the Hundred Million Talents Project in the New Century, and one candidate for the “New Century Excellent Talents Support Program” of the Ministry of Education. Program” of the Ministry of Education, 4 persons enjoying the special allowance of the State Council, 1 person receiving the national “May Day Labor Medal”, 2 young and middle-aged experts with outstanding contribution in the province, 38 persons of the provincial “151 Talent Project”, 6 young social science scholars of the provincial Zhijiang There are 6 scholars, and 13 people in the training program for leading talents in provincial universities.

With the mission of serving local economic and social development, the university has established six research institutions, including Zhejiang Cultural “Going Out” Collaborative Innovation Center, Country and Regional Research Center, Education Governance Research Center, Foreign Language Education Research Center, Urban Internationalization Research Institute and Mediterranean Rim Research Institute, etc. The university also has research bases such as Zhejiang Xi Jinping Research Center of Socialist Thought with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era. It also has eight provincial and ministerial-level research platforms (think tanks), including the research base of the Research Centre for Socialist Thought of the New Era of Xi Jinping of Zhejiang Province, three international research cooperation platforms, and two research institutes jointly established with the Chinese and Foreign Humanities Exchange Centre of the Ministry of Education. The Journal of Zhejiang Foreign Language Institute is a national outstanding social science journal for universities. The school is the “National Training Program” of the Ministry of Education – a model centralized training base, the training base for headmasters of the Pilot Project of the Ministry of Education, the key construction base for teacher education in Zhejiang Province, and the cultivation base for international service outsourcing talents in Zhejiang Province. The Zhejiang Provincial Department of Education has set up the Zhejiang Teacher Training Centre and the Sino-German Cooperation Programme Office for Teacher Training in the school, which has conducted training for more than 300,000 people since its establishment. The school publishes three publications, Teaching Monthly (Secondary School Edition), Teaching Monthly (Primary School Edition), New World of Composition and the Primary School World newspaper.

The school attaches importance to the opening up of education to the outside world and has signed education exchange agreements with more than 150 universities in over 50 countries and regions. More than 160 educational exchange programmes are offered year-round, including 10 national government scholarship programmes, more than 10 overseas internship programmes, nearly 20 double-degree or bachelor’s degree programmes and more than 80 inter-university exchange programmes, with an annual average of 500 students sent to participate in the programmes and more than 200 international students accepted. The university also cooperates with the University of Zaragoza in Spain to hold the first Sino-foreign cooperative training programme for Spanish (tourism) in China, and the Italian language programme with the University of Foreigners in Siena is the only one in China at present. The university has established the Confucius Institute of the National University of Equatorial Guinea and the Confucius Institute of Antigua and Barbuda, which attach importance to international Chinese language education. It actively builds platforms for international youth exchanges and international cultural exchanges, and contributes to telling the Chinese story and building a community of human destiny by organising activities such as forums and dialogues, thematic exchanges, cultural exhibitions and cultural experiences.

The university is located in the Xiaoweshan Higher Education Park, adjacent to the Xixi Wetland. The campus covers an area of 555.5 mu and has fully functional and modern teaching facilities, including a provincial key experimental teaching demonstration centre and a provincial experimental teaching demonstration centre, as well as basic and professional experimental centres (rooms) such as a language laboratory, a simultaneous interpretation laboratory, a teacher education experimental teaching centre, a tourism management experimental centre, an e-commerce experimental centre and a virtual simulation experimental teaching centre. The university library has a collection of 1,082,000 paper volumes and 754 newspapers and periodicals; there are 32 databases, 1,793,000 electronic books and 27,000 electronic periodicals.

In recent years, the university has closely focused on the development of the country and Zhejiang, and closely dovetailed with the open development strategy of Zhejiang and the construction of “One Belt, One Road”, “Important Window” and “Common Wealth Demonstration Zone”. With the aim of strengthening its own characteristics, enhancing its core competitiveness and forming comparative advantages, the university proposed at the Second Party Congress the goal of becoming “a key base for the training of international talents in Zhejiang Province, a think tank serving Zhejiang’s open and strong province, and an important position for international cultural and educational exchanges in Zhejiang”. In the 14th Five-Year Plan, we have established four key areas of development, namely foreign languages and literature, foreign economic and trade, international cultural tourism and regional education governance, forming a strategic layout of “three places and four regions”. At present, we are focusing on the “three regions and four areas”, promoting the connotative development of the university, and making unremitting efforts to build the university into a well-known foreign language university with distinctive characteristics and first-class educational quality.