Peking University

Peking University (PKU; Chinese: 北京大学; pinyin: Běijīng Dàxué), often abbreviated as Beida (北大), is a public research university in Beijing, China that ranks as one of the world's leading centers of artificial intelligence research. In the 2026 CSRankings, PKU placed first worldwide in the Artificial Intelligence area and fifth overall in computer science (tied with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and its machine-learning group published 165 papers in the tracking window, the most of any institution.^[7] Founded in 1898 during the late Qing dynasty as the Imperial University of Peking, it is the oldest modern national university in China and is consistently ranked alongside Tsinghua University as one of the country's top two institutions of higher learning.^[1] PKU's AI work is concentrated in the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (founded 2019 and led by Zhu Songchun), the Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, the School of Computer Science, and labs that have produced widely cited open-source projects including ChatLaw, PKU-SafeRLHF (Beaver), and the Open-Sora Plan.^[2]

Infobox

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History

Founding and the Imperial University (1898 to 1912)

PKU was established by imperial edict during the Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, a brief modernization push led by reformers Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao with the support of the Guangxu Emperor.^[1] On June 11, 1898, the emperor authorized the creation of the Imperial University of Peking (京师大学堂, Jīngshī Dàxuétáng).^[1] The institution formally opened on December 31, 1898 with William Alexander Parsons Martin, an American missionary and sinologist, as its first president.^[1] The school sat in central Beijing near Shatan, close to the imperial palace.

The Hundred Days' Reform collapsed within months when the Empress Dowager Cixi seized power in a coup on September 21, 1898 and rolled back most of the reform decrees.^[1] The Imperial University was one of the few reform-era institutions to survive, in part because it had already begun operating and because the imperial court still saw value in a modern training school for civil servants. It functioned during these early years as both China's first national comprehensive university and the highest education authority in the country, supervising the establishment of new schools across the empire.^[3]

Republican era and the New Culture Movement

Following the Xinhai Revolution and the founding of the Republic of China, the Ministry of Education in May 1912 ordered the school renamed Peking University (国立北京大学).^[1] Yan Fu, the translator of Thomas Huxley and Adam Smith into Chinese, served briefly as the first president under the new name.^[1] The defining figure of the early republican period, however, was Cai Yuanpei, who became chancellor in late 1916 and held the post (with interruptions) until 1926.^[1] Cai had studied in Germany and brought the model of academic freedom with him. He hired faculty across the political spectrum, including the liberal philosopher Hu Shih, the literary modernist Lu Xun, and Marxist intellectuals Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao.^[22] His guiding phrase, 思想自由, 兼容并包 ("freedom of thought, all-inclusiveness"), still gets quoted as the spirit of the university.

Under Cai, PKU became the intellectual center of the New Culture Movement and the launching point of the May Fourth Movement.^[18] On the evening of May 3, 1919, after learning that the Beiyang government planned to sign the Treaty of Versailles ceding former German concessions in Shandong to Japan, students gathered in the PKU Third Auditorium and resolved to march.^[18] The next afternoon more than 4,000 students from PKU, Yenching University, and other Beijing schools assembled in front of Tiananmen, demanding that China refuse the treaty.^[18] Thirty-one students were arrested; one PKU student, Guo Qinguang, died from injuries sustained during the protest.^[18] The movement spread to cities across China and forced the Chinese delegation in Paris to refuse to sign on June 28, 1919.^[18]

War, exile, and Southwest Associated University

With the Japanese invasion of north China in 1937, PKU evacuated south.^[1] Together with Tsinghua and Nankai, it formed the Changsha Provisional University and then, after a further retreat, the National Southwest Associated University (Lianda) in Kunming.^[1] Lianda operated under wartime conditions until 1946 and is remembered as one of the most academically productive periods in modern Chinese higher education. PKU returned to Beijing after Japan's defeat.^[1]

1952 reorganization and the move to Yan Yuan

In 1952 the new People's Republic government reorganized China's higher education system on a Soviet model, breaking up comprehensive universities into specialized institutes.^[19] The arts and sciences faculties of Tsinghua and the recently nationalized Yenching University were merged into PKU, while PKU's engineering programs went to Tsinghua and its medical school became an independent institution (later reabsorbed in 2000 as the PKU Health Science Center).^[19] Most consequentially, PKU left its old central Beijing site and moved to the former Yenching campus in the northwestern suburbs, in what is now Haidian District.^[19] The Yan Yuan ("Yan Garden") campus, with its Weiming Lake and traditional pavilion architecture, has been PKU's main campus ever since.^[3]

Cultural Revolution and the reform era

PKU was at the center of the Cultural Revolution when, on May 25, 1966, philosophy lecturer Nie Yuanzi posted a big-character poster attacking the university administration.^[1] Mao Zedong called the poster "the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster in China" and it helped trigger the wider movement.^[1] Classes were suspended; faculty were sent for re-education; and many scholars were persecuted. The university only resumed normal operations after 1977, when the national college entrance examination (gaokao) was restored.^[1]

The Deng Xiaoping reform period brought rapid recovery and international reopening. PKU was designated a national key university and was among the first nine institutions admitted to Project 211 (1995) and Project 985 (1998), the central government's two main programs for funding world-class universities.^[3] In 2017 it joined the Double First Class initiative.^[3]

Contemporary expansion

The Shenzhen Graduate School opened in 2001, eventually growing into a full satellite campus that hosts PKU HSBC Business School and the School of AI for Science.^[20] In 2019 PKU established its Institute for Artificial Intelligence; in 2021 it spun off the School of Computer Science and the School of Integrated Circuits as standalone schools; and in September 2021 it opened a new Changping campus dedicated to engineering and applied sciences.^[10]

Academic structure

PKU groups its 55 schools and departments into six broad faculties (Sciences, Information and Engineering, Humanities, Social Sciences, Economics and Management, Health Science Center) plus a number of cross-cutting interdisciplinary institutes.^[3] The table below covers the schools that show up most often in AI research and English-language reporting; it is not exhaustive.

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Yenching Academy

The Yenching Academy of Peking University, opened in 2014, is a residential English-medium master's program in China Studies.^[17] The two-year degree is structured around six concentrations including economics and management, history and archaeology, literature and culture, philosophy and religion, politics and international relations, and law and society.^[17] Yenching Scholars receive full tuition, accommodation in the academy's residential college, and a monthly stipend.^[17] The program was patterned in part on the Rhodes Scholarship and is one of the larger sources of foreign graduate students at PKU.^[17]

How is Peking University ranked?

PKU sits near the top of every major global ranking and trades the number-one mainland Chinese spot back and forth with Tsinghua University depending on the methodology and the year.^[5] In the 2026 CSRankings it placed first worldwide specifically in the Artificial Intelligence area, the clearest signal of its standing in the field.^[7]

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How strong is AI and computer science research at Peking University?

This is the part most relevant to AI Wiki readers, so it gets the most detail. PKU's AI work is spread across several units that grew out of different traditions: a long-running mathematics and computing department, a software-engineering school, an electronics and information faculty, and a newer cluster of dedicated AI institutes built up over the past decade.

The headline result is the 2026 CSRankings, which ranks departments by publication counts at the most selective venues. PKU topped the Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision sections and led its Chinese peers across the AI-related areas.^[7] Thirteen PKU faculty published more than ten papers each at the leading conferences, led by Zhang Shanghang (19), Zhang Ming (15), Yang Yaodong (14), Lu Zongqing (13), and Zhou Jiahuan (13).^[7] As PKU News summarized the result, "Peking University (PKU) has topped the chart in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision sections of the 2026 CSRankings."^[7]

Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology

The Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology (王选计算机研究所) is named after Wang Xuan, the PKU alumnus and academician who in the 1970s and 1980s led development of the Founder Chinese laser typesetting system, which transformed Chinese-language publishing and made bitmap font compression for thousands of CJK characters practical on early computers.^[8] Wang founded the original Computer Science Research Institute in 1983; it was renamed in his honor in 2010, four years after his death.^[9] The institute today works on natural language processing, multimedia computing, and computer graphics, and is one of the homes of PKU's NLP research.^[9]

Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI)

The Institute for Artificial Intelligence (北京大学人工智能研究院) was set up in April 2019 as a university-level institute reporting directly to the PKU administration rather than sitting inside any one school. It is led by Zhu Songchun, who returned to China from UCLA in 2020 to take the post.^[11] The institute's stated approach contrasts what its director calls the dominant "big data, small tasks" Western paradigm with a "small data, big tasks" alternative grounded in cognitive science, developmental psychology, and a unified theory of intelligence Zhu has been pursuing since the 1990s.^[12] Zhu frames the competition in artificial general intelligence as more than a contest of compute: "In the background, however, is not merely about competition in technological capabilities but, even more so, it is a struggle for global confidence and for control of the narrative."^[23]

The related School of Intelligence Science and Technology was reorganized as a degree-granting school around the same period and now offers undergraduate, master's, and doctoral programs in intelligence science.

Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI)

BIGAI (北京通用人工智能研究院) is a non-profit research institute founded in 2020 and led by Zhu Songchun.^[11] It is closely affiliated with PKU and Tsinghua and shares faculty and students with the Institute for AI.^[12] BIGAI's flagship public project is Tong Tong (通通), announced in January 2024, which it described as an "AI child" agent designed to model behaviors and developmental stages of a three-to-four-year-old human.^[12] The institute's research style emphasizes embodied cognition, social common sense, and value alignment over scaling, which sets it apart from most of the high-profile Chinese LLM labs.^[12]

School of Computer Science

PKU's computer-science discipline goes back to 1959, when an early CS program was set up under the Department of Radio Electronics.^[10] It became a Department of Computer Science and Technology in 1978 and was folded into the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science when EECS was created in 2002.^[10] On October 24, 2021 it was promoted again, this time to a standalone School of Computer Science (信息科学技术学院 / 计算机学院).^[10] The school covers systems, theory, networking, security, AI, and HCI.^[10]

In the 2026 CSRankings, PKU placed fifth worldwide overall (tied with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and first in the Artificial Intelligence area.^[7] PKU's machine-learning subfield alone published 165 papers across the CSRankings tracking window, the highest of any institution.^[7]

Notable AI faculty

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What open-source AI models has Peking University released?

PKU labs have shipped a number of widely cited open-source releases. The most visible cluster comes from PKU-YuanGroup (the lab of Li Yuan at the Shenzhen Graduate School) and from the PKU-Alignment team.

• ChatLaw (PKU-YuanGroup, 2023). An open-source Chinese legal LLM fine-tuned on Ziya-LLaMA-13B with LoRA, paired with a BERT retriever trained on roughly 937,000 case-law examples and a mixture-of-experts variant that the authors report outperforming GPT-4 on the LawBench benchmark and on practice exams for the Chinese bar. Released on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. Reference: arXiv:2306.16092.^[13]
• Open-Sora Plan (PKU-YuanGroup with Rabbit Expo AIGC Joint Lab, 2024 onward). An open-source effort to reproduce a Sora-class text-to-video diffusion model. Its 2026 model, Helios, is a 14-billion-parameter video generator that the authors report runs at 19.5 frames per second on a single H100 GPU and supports minute-scale video synthesis.^[14]
• MoE-LLaVA (PKU-YuanGroup, 2024). A mixture-of-experts variant of the LLaVA vision-language model architecture. Accepted to IEEE TMM 2025.
• MagicTime (PKU-YuanGroup, 2024). A time-lapse video generation model framed as a metamorphic simulator. Accepted to IEEE TPAMI 2025.
• Safe RLHF / Beaver (PKU-Alignment team, 2023). The first open framework to support all stages of RLHF including a safety-preference reward model. The accompanying PKU-SafeRLHF dataset contains human-labeled preference pairs across more than ten harm categories.^[16] The Safe RLHF paper was an ICLR 2024 Spotlight.^[15]
• Aligner (PKU-Alignment, 2024). An efficient post-training alignment method that learns to correct outputs from frozen base models. NeurIPS 2024 Oral.
• Machine-Mindset (PKU-YuanGroup, 2024). A set of 16 LLMs fine-tuned to express different MBTI personality types, released along with the training data.

Role in Chinese open-source LLM scene

PKU groups have been central to the Chinese open-source LLM ecosystem in two ways. First, several flagship Chinese-language fine-tunes (ChatLaw and Beaver in particular) trace back to PKU labs.^[13] Second, PKU-Alignment's safety datasets are now widely used by other Chinese labs, including teams at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), as a standard reference for alignment evaluation.^[16] PKU also collaborates with BAAI on shared research programs and faculty appointments.

Notable alumni

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Campus and life

The main campus, known as Yan Yuan (燕园, "Yan Garden"), occupies 274 hectares in Haidian District in northwest Beijing.^[3] The site sits on the grounds of several Qing-dynasty princely gardens, which were combined and developed by American Methodist missionaries to form Yenching University in the 1920s.^[1] The architecture is mostly grey-brick courtyard buildings with pitched tile roofs, designed by the American architect Henry Killam Murphy in a style sometimes called "Sino-Western collegiate."^[1]

The most photographed feature of the campus is Weiming Lake (未名湖, "Lake Without a Name"), a roughly oval lake at the heart of campus surrounded by walking paths, willow trees, and small pavilions.^[1] On its southern bank stands the Boya Pagoda (博雅塔), a 1924 thirteen-story imitation Liao-style brick pagoda that doubles as the campus water tower.^[1] The skyline of pagoda above lake ("一塔湖图," a Chinese pun that uses three characters meaning "a pagoda, a lake, a library" but sounds like "a city of pictures") is part of the campus identity.

Other landmarks include the PKU Library, the largest university library in Asia with more than 10 million printed volumes (including about 1.5 million volumes of Chinese ancient books); the Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology; the Museum of University History; and the Lakeview Building.^[24] The campus borders Yuanmingyuan (Old Summer Palace) to the north and the Tsinghua University campus to the east.^[1]

In addition to the Haidian main campus, PKU operates the Changping campus (opened 2021) for engineering and applied sciences, the Daxing campus for the School of Software and Microelectronics, the Health Science Center campus across central Beijing, and the Shenzhen Graduate School in University Town, Nanshan District.^[3]

Affiliations

PKU belongs to most of the major groupings of leading Chinese universities:

• C9 League: An informal alliance of nine leading mainland Chinese universities, modeled loosely on the Ivy League and the AAU.
• Project 985: A central-government program announced in May 1998 by Jiang Zemin to fund a small group of universities to world-class status. PKU was one of the first two named (with Tsinghua).
• Project 211: A larger 1995 funding program covering about 100 institutions; PKU is part of it.
• Double First Class (双一流): The successor program announced in 2017, designed to develop "world-class universities" and "world-class disciplines." PKU was placed in the highest tier.
• Universitas 21, AEARU, APRU: International university networks.

PKU has long-running collaborations with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and shares many academicians with it; over 115 PKU faculty members are CAS or Chinese Academy of Engineering academicians.^[3]

References

1. "Peking University" entry on English Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_University ↩
2. Peking University official English website, https://english.pku.edu.cn/ ↩
3. "About Us," Peking University, https://english.pku.edu.cn/about.html ↩
4. "Office of the President," Peking University, https://english.pku.edu.cn/detail/11807.html
5. "PKU clinches the 14th spot globally as Chinese universities move up the ranking en masse," PKU News, https://newsen.pku.edu.cn/news_events/news/focus/15004.html ↩
6. "World University Rankings 2026: results announced," Times Higher Education, https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/world-university-rankings-2026-results-announced
7. "PKU Dominates in Artificial Intelligence in the 2026 CSRankings," PKU News, https://newsen.pku.edu.cn/news_events/news/focus/15389.html ↩
8. "Wang Xuan (computer scientist)" on English Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Xuan_(computer_scientist) ↩
9. Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, https://www.icst.pku.edu.cn/english/home/index.htm ↩
10. School of Computer Science, Peking University, https://cs.pku.edu.cn/English/About_Us/Overview.htm ↩
11. "Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence" on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Institute_for_General_Artificial_Intelligence ↩
12. "Spotlight on Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence," Center for Security and Emerging Technology, https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/spotlight-on-beijing-institute-for-general-artificial-intelligence/ ↩
13. PKU-YuanGroup, ChatLaw repository, https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/ChatLaw and arXiv:2306.16092 ↩
14. PKU-YuanGroup, Open-Sora Plan and Helios repositories, https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Open-Sora-Plan and https://github.com/PKU-YuanGroup/Helios ↩
15. PKU-Alignment, Safe RLHF repository, https://github.com/PKU-Alignment/safe-rlhf ↩
16. "PKU-SafeRLHF: Towards Multi-Level Safety Alignment for LLMs with Human Preference," arXiv:2406.15513, https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.15513 ↩
17. Yenching Academy of Peking University, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yenching_Academy ↩
18. "May Fourth Movement" on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement ↩
19. "1952 reorganization of higher education in China" on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_reorganization_of_higher_education_in_China ↩
20. "Peking University HSBC Business School" on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_University_HSBC_Business_School ↩
21. ShanghaiRanking ARWU 2025, https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2025
22. "List of Peking University people" on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Peking_University_people ↩
23. "Song-Chun Zhu: The Race to General Purpose Artificial Intelligence is not Merely About Technological Competition," Center for Security and Emerging Technology, https://cset.georgetown.edu/publication/song-chun-zhu-ai-narrative-control/ ↩
24. "Peking University Libraries" on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_University_Libraries ↩