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The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GHM) in south China is fast becoming a knowledge powerhouse for Asia and beyond. In 2016, the GDP of the GHM, which takes up one eighth of Greater China, is close to that of Canada, and is expected to be the world’s largest bay economy, exceeding the Tokyo Bay Area within the next five years. At the heart of the GHM lies Shenzhen, where the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) was born in 2012.
Shenzhen was a small fishing village nearly 40 years ago. Today, it has been transformed into an international megacity, hosting more than 30,000 technology companies. As one of the R&D and manufacturing hubs of China, Shenzhen is the perfect place for entrepreneurs, researchers and innovators alike to make their home alongside tech giants such as Huawei, Tencent, BYD, DJI, BJI and Mindray.
Shenzhen's cutting-edge areas of innovation – biotechnology, information technology, new energy, new materials, telecommunications, and the cultural and creative industries – make it a rising global metropolis. Some 43% of the total PCT patent applications in China in 2017 came from Shenzhen.
Being located in such a leading innovation city – often dubbed China’s Silicon Valley – SUSTech plays a major role in increasing international connectivity and fostering collaborative endeavors within academia and beyond to address the grand challenges in our contemporary world. SUSTech’s goals are to be a world-class research university; to cultivate outstanding and innovative talents, and to produce high-impact research. The university also aims to support the sustainable development of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province and China more broadly by advancing knowledge and promoting the application of new technologies.
SUSTech was established just seven years ago to serve as a model for higher education reform in the interest of modernizing the national university system. It is anchored in research, innovation and entrepreneurship, all key attributes vital for socio-economic development in our interconnected cities, regions and countries.
Find out more about SUSTech’s rankings
As a reformative and global university, SUSTech is known for several innovations in China. Among them a modern governance system, a novel and comprehensive admissions system, use of English as the instructional language, and a curriculum rooted in innovation and entrepreneurship. These measures ensure institutional autonomy and merit-based admission and also instill a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in our students and graduates, which equips them for the increasingly challenging realities of the world.
SUSTech also takes pride in the quality of our faculty. About 60% of them were educated or worked at top global research universities, while over 30% either have received top distinctions such as various national academy memberships or were recruited via the “Thousand Talents Programme” or the “Thousand Young Talents Programme”, both established in the late 2000s to attract leading scholars from across the world to China.
SUSTech’s youth has been no barrier to its forming a string of prestigious partnerships across the globe. Together, we aim to leverage our partnerships to increase the connectivity between universities and cities, and to nurture our students as the next generation of leaders in science, engineering and management who will contribute to solving the challenges confronting our rapidly changing world.
Over the past seven years of working together, the relationship between Shenzhen and SUSTech has become increasingly intertwined. The city has provided resources, land and funding to the university. In return, talent, innovation and culture flow from the university into the city. More than 90% of SUSTech graduates who go straight into work remain in the region after graduating. Many of those graduates are employed at companies such as Tencent and Huawei, two of China’s most prominent tech companies, both of which are headquartered in the city.
