Baoding University (BU) is one of the most significant application-oriented public universities in China, which has been selected as a pilot university of the Thirteenth Five-Year Project Enterprise-education Integration by the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Education of China since 2016. In recent years, BU has been awarded more than twenty honorary titles by the Central Government and Hebei Provincial Government such as “National Model Unit of China”, “Provincial Model Unit of Hebei”, “Garden-like Unit”, “Outstanding Health Unit” and so on.
BU has been established as an educational institution for over 100 years. In 1904, it was firstly founded as “Baoding Primary Teachers’ Training School”, and developed into “The Second Teachers’ School of Zhili” in 1910. Then, it changed its name into “The Second Teachers’ School of Hebei” in 1928. In 1978, this secondary school was transformed into a higher educational institute, “Baoding Teachers College” (BTC), under the approval of the State Council. In 2007, the Ministry of Education of China issued an official instruction to confirm BTC’s upgrading to “Baoding University”.
BU is located in Baoding City, Hebei Province in China with beautiful environment and convenient transportation. It takes approximately 50 minutes from the university to Beijing, the capital of China, by high-speed train since the railway station is close to the BU main gateway, and is only 30 minutes’ drive from the campus to Xiong’an New Area, a new national-level development zone.
BU covers 920.2 mu (i.e., approximately 152 acres) and the constructed area is 343,900 square meters. Teaching facilities and equipments are well prepared at BU. There are laboratories of nine categories (i.e., Biology Experiment Center, Chemistry Experiment Center, Physics and Electronic Engineering Experiment Center, Resources and Environment Experiment Laboratories, Information Technology Experiment Laboratories, Mathematics and Computer Science Experiment Laboratories, Foreign Languages Laboratories, and the Internet Center) and 89 training rooms of various functions. The teaching equipments value approximately 135,544,400 RMB. There is campus network of 10 gigabit Ethernet, which provides faculty members and students with Wi-Fi and wired broadband in all the buildings. In the BU library, there are more than 1.40 million paper-based books, 480,000 digital books and 1,200 kinds of journals. More than 100,000 ancient classics and over 1,000 valuable copies of historical literatures are carefully stored there, and millions of academic articles and e-learning materials can be downloaded for free from its 18 accessible databases, including CNKI, VIP, and so on.
At BU, there are 54 undergraduate programs in 9 major disciplines including Science, Arts, Engineering, Education, History, Law, Art, Management, and Economics. Art Education has been successfully selected as one of the 1st-Block National Online Open Courses. Since 2016, BU has developed 3 Provincial Key Development Disciplines, 1 National Quality Course, 4 Provincial Quality Courses, 5 Provincial Quality Resource-sharing Courses, 2 Hebei First-class Undergraduate Courses, 10 Provincial First-class construction majors and 1 Provincial Professional Comprehensive Reform Pilot Project, 3 Provincial Pilot Projects of Experimental Teaching, and 54 Provincial Educational Reform Projects. At present, there are nearly 16,000 full-time students enrolled in BU.
More than 1000 full-time faculty members are officially employed by BU, including 239 professors and associate professors. Prof. Wang Zikun, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. Cao Aocheng, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, are invited as Special Professors for the university. 94 experts and scholars from Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and other well-known universities or research institutes are invited as visiting professors.
BU focuses on serving the needs of the national strategies of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Coordinated Development and the Xiong'an New Area Development, and is making great efforts in advancing the application-oriented education. “Baoding University Modern Training Center” and the other 7 national level enterprise-education Integration platforms have been erected at BU in recent years. It has cooperated with Federation of University Sports of China (FUSC) to build “FUSC Taekwondo Branch Demonstration Team Training Base” and “Chinese University Students Traditional Sports Training Base” at campus. With the support of Hebei Provincial Market Administration Bureau, “Hebei Intellectual Property Law Training Center” has been established at BU as well. At present, there have been more than 130 enterprises carrying out in-depth cooperation with the University. BU has also been selected to design and run the “Xiong'an: Green Land beside the Lake” website, which is one of the eight major cultural projects of Xiong'an New Area.
BU pays special attention to scientific research as well. Since 2016, BU has undertaken 5 national level research projects and 101 provincial level ones. 179 academic papers have been published on CSCI, SCI, ISTP and EI journals in the past 5 years. BU wins 7 Excellent Awards of Social Science Studies at provincial level and 51 at municipal level.
BU has established cooperative relationship with a number of overseas educational institutions in Australia, the USA, the UK, Spain, Poland, Finland, Malaysia, Korea, and Japan (e.g., University of New South Wales in Australia, University of East Kentucky in the U.S.A., University of the West of Scotland in the UK, Universidad de Valladolid in Spain, University of Malaya in Malaysia, University of Science Malaysia, Keimyung University in Korea, Sapporo International University in Japan, etc.). A number of BU students have studied abroad as exchange students or as postgraduates in these cooperative universities. Many faculty members have been supported by China’s government or BU to go to overseas institutions as visiting scholars or doing their PhDs. With the approval of the MOE, dozens of BU’s faculty members and students have been selected to teach Chinese in the U.S.A., Samoa, Ghana, and Thailand. In June 2015, BU Chorus was delegated by the Ministry of Culture as representatives of China to participate in the 4th Choir Festival in Estonia and attracted favorable comments at home and abroad. In 2018, two groups of international students from the United States came to the university to study Chinese language, Chinese culture and other courses. In 2020, BU built the country's first "HSK Study-in-China Base" with Chinese Testing International (CTI) to recruit international students. Up to now, it has cooperated with Fudan University, Nanjing University and other Chinese double-first-class universities in training more than 600 Japanese students online, which has been recognized by partners and students.
BU highlights the cultivation of students' well-rounded development. An elegant and positive university cultural atmosphere has been created for the students to grow up and become well educated talents through the diverse activities such as university science and technology festivals, culture and art festivals, student club activities, social practices, volunteering service activities, etc. In the Fourth and Fifth National University Students Art Exhibitions, BU won 1 first prize, 7 second prizes, 3 third prizes, and ranked first in Hebei Province. BU has been consecutively granted “National University Students Art Exhibition Excellent Organization Award” for four years. The original one-act drama, “Cai Hesen's Buli Dream” was selected as the 2014 National Arts Foundation Project. In the 14th Beijing International Chorus Festival Competition, BU chorus won the gold medal. From 2018 to 2020, hundreds of BU students have been invited to participate in the performances of National Day Celebration Shows by China Central Television. BU students have also repeatedly achieved excellent results in a number of competitions and contests, including National “Internet+” University Student Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, “Challenge Cup” University Student Extracurricular Academic Science and Technology Competition, “Creative Youth" University Student Entrepreneurship Contest, and so on.
Rooted in its development of over one hundred years, BU has established its unique university culture and spirit. Adhering to the motto of “Emphasizing Both Virtue and Academic Achievement; Highlighting Both Knowing and Doing”, BU has cultivated a great deal of graduates who contributed a lot to the development of China in political, economic, educational, scientific and technological, and cultural fields. for example, Prof. Shi Changxu (an academician of both the CAS and the CAE and the winner of the State Supreme Science and Technology Award in 2010), Wang Heshou (the former Party Secretary of the Disciplinary Commission of China), Tie Ying (the former Party Secretary of Zhejiang Province), Yang Shijie (the former Vice Minister of the Organization Department of the Central Committee), Zang Boping (the former Vice Minister of the National Ministry of Education), Yang Zejiang (the former Vice Party Secretary of Hebei Province), Ding Haochuan (the former President of Northeast Normal University), etc. Over 60 of BU graduates have ever worked as leaders at and above the ministerial level. The rate of graduates’ employment of BU has been ranking at the top among universities of the same level in Hebei in recent years.
On the eve of Youth Day in 2014, a lot of China’s major media reported that President Xi Jinping wrote a letter to a group of over 100 BU graduates, who had willingly chosen to become rural school teachers in the underdeveloped and remote areas in the west provinces of China, to show his thankfulness and encouragement for their great contributions to the education development in those areas, and advocated that Chinese young people regard them as their role models. In 2015, this BU graduates as a special group was granted “China Youth Wusi Outstanding Achievement Medal”.