On my third weekend in Shanghai — the first one I didn't fly home to Dalian for — a friend and I rode bicycles from Jinqiao, in Pudong, all the way across the river to the university district in Yangpu. We rode straight through Fudan's campus, then kept going and did the same at Tongji and at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. Nobody stopped us. Nobody asked for ID. It was 2012, and China's university campuses were still open to the public — you could ride a bicycle through the middle of one of the country's most prestigious schools on a Saturday afternoon, the same way you'd ride through a park.
That's gone now. Most Chinese campuses, Fudan included, require registration or ID checks for outside visitors today. I have no insider's view of Fudan — I never studied there, never worked there, only pedaled through it once, over a decade ago, when the front door happened to be wide open to anyone. That's a strange kind of access to have written a page from: not a student's, not an alumnus's, but a stranger's, from a year when the whole idea of "who gets in" meant something much simpler than it does now.
Fudan is also the clearest place on this site to test a question the Shanghai city piece raises but doesn't fully answer: does this city's famous openness — its international look, its money, its comfort with foreigners — actually mean its gates are easier to get through? Or is Shanghai, like Beijing, still running a rule underneath the market surface?
01 — What this university is
A Jesuit-founded college that became one of China's most internationally minded universities
Fudan University was founded in 1905 by the Chinese Jesuit priest Ma Xiangbo as Fudan College, a preparatory school offering both general and specialized tracks. It became a private university in 1917, adopted an American-style credit and elective system in 1921, survived a wartime relocation to Chongqing, and was reorganized into a Soviet-model comprehensive university after 1952 — a history that runs through nearly every phase of modern Chinese higher education, not just one era of it.
Today Fudan sits inside the same national tiers that anchor every school on this site's university line — Project 985, Double First-Class Category A status, and membership in the C9 League alongside Tsinghua, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhejiang University, Nanjing University, University of Science and Technology of China, Xi'an Jiao Tong University, and Harbin Institute of Technology. It ranked 30th in the world in the 2026 QS World University Rankings, spans 12 discipline categories — including philosophy, economics, law, education, literature, history, science, engineering, medicine, management, and cross-disciplinary fields — with 20 subjects selected into China's second-round Double First-Class discipline list, 21 subjects ranked in the global top 1% by ESI, and 10 subjects in the global top 1‰.
Fudan was also one of the earliest universities in China to accept foreign students at all, and today draws roughly 7,000 international student-visits a year from close to 130 countries — a figure that, by Fudan's own account, spans everyone from full-degree students to short-term exchange visitors, not one uniform category.
02 — The market surface, the rule underneath
Why an internationally branded university still gates its front door with an interview
The Shanghai city deep-dive on this site argues that this city, seen from the riverbank, looks like Shanghai and New York are twins — skyscrapers, a financial district, waves of migrants chasing opportunity — but that underneath the shared skyline, one city runs on a market and the other runs on a household-registration system that decides who actually gets to belong. Fudan turns out to be a small, precise version of that same split.
From outside, Fudan looks like the most globally fluent university in this series — 40 English-taught programs, partnerships with over 200 universities across roughly 50 countries, thousands of exchange students moving through every year. But the university's own mainstream Chinese-medium bachelor's program — the pathway most international undergraduates actually apply through — still runs on an in-person interview that explicitly evaluates both a candidate's overall profile and their Chinese-language ability. The front door looks international. The lock on it is still Chinese.
Concretely: an applicant to Fudan's Chinese-taught undergraduate program registers online, sits a subject-specific written test (the CSCA, administered in Chinese), pays a non-refundable ¥800 application fee, and — if the university's initial review clears them — is invited to an interview whose stated purpose is to assess "comprehensive quality and Chinese-language ability." Money moves the process along; it doesn't replace that interview, and it doesn't replace the language requirement underneath it.
This is the opposite emphasis from Beijing's Tsinghua page on this site, where the gate is explicitly a national quota-and-exam system. Fudan's gate is narrower and more local to the institution itself — but it's still a gate built on rules an applicant has to clear, not a price an applicant can simply pay.
03 — Can you actually study here?
What an international applicant needs to know — and what I couldn't confirm
Here is what Fudan's own 2026-cycle admissions materials — published through its International Students Office — actually say:
| Question | What Fudan's own 2026 materials say |
|---|---|
| Bachelor's degree, mainstream track | Chinese-medium instruction (中文授课项目). Application: online registration → CSCA subject test (Chinese-language academic assessment, subjects vary by intended major) → ¥800 non-refundable application fee → interview assessing comprehensive quality and Chinese-language ability → admission decision. |
| English-taught programs | Approximately 40 English-taught programs across bachelor's and master's level combined, per Fudan's current admissions materials. Tuition for English-taught programs ranges roughly ¥50,000–¥269,900 per year depending on program. |
| Application portal | istudent.fudan.edu.cn/apply, run by Fudan's International Students Office. |
| International academic footprint | ~7,000 international student-visits per year from ~130 countries; agreements with 200+ partner universities across ~50 countries; hosts 3,000+ incoming exchange students annually. |
| Specific HSK score threshold for the Chinese-medium bachelor's track | Not confirmed — Fudan's own materials describe the interview as assessing Chinese ability directly, rather than publishing a single minimum HSK band the way some other universities do. |
| Exact 2026 application deadline dates | Not confirmed from the materials available at time of writing — application-window dates for this specific program were not published as a clean, single range the way Tsinghua's were. |
Source: Fudan University's own International Students Office site (iso.fudan.edu.cn) and its 2026 undergraduate Chinese-medium admissions guide, retrieved July 2026. These are terms for the 2026 admissions cycle specifically — treat every figure above as dated to that cycle, not permanent, and confirm current terms directly with Fudan's International Students Office before applying.
What this table does not tell you, and what still needs direct, dated sourcing before this page can call itself complete: a single, current, officially-published total international degree-student headcount. Fudan's own materials describe roughly 7,000 international student-visits a year, but that figure explicitly blends degree students with short-term and exchange visitors — it is not a clean enrollment count, and I found no equally official figure that separates the two cleanly at time of writing. Rather than borrow a third-party aggregator's number and present it as Fudan's own, I'm marking the clean figure open.
A personal data point, clearly marked as one
My one data point from Fudan itself is from 2012, and it isn't about admissions at all: campuses like this one used to let a stranger on a bicycle ride straight through. That tells you something true about how open Chinese higher education briefly looked from the street — and nothing at all about the actual, rule-based admissions process described in the table above, which was never something a bicycle ride could have tested.
04 — What it costs, and what it's like to live here
The student-year budget, still to be filled in
What needs sourcing here: international student dormitory availability and typical monthly cost, off-campus rent near Yangpu's university district specifically, and a rough monthly budget for food, transport, and essentials at a student's scale — distinct from the general household figures already published in the Shanghai city deep-dive, which remains the baseline for the city's overall cost of living.
One thing does not need sourcing, because it's already been reported in depth on this site: Shanghai is the one city in this entire series where a single rent-to-income ratio actually lies, because the city is structurally split into two very different populations living at two very different price points. A prospective student weighing Fudan should read that piece before assuming any single "average" cost applies to their own situation — the honest answer, as the city piece puts it, depends on which Shanghai you actually end up living in.
05 — The honest brake
What this page won't promise you
A few things have to stay unresolved rather than dressed up as settled:
- Language, underneath the international branding. Fudan's global partnerships and English-taught program count are real, but the mainstream undergraduate pathway most applicants actually use is Chinese-medium, with Chinese ability assessed directly in the interview. "Internationally minded" is not the same claim as "English-medium."
- The open campus is gone. Whatever this page says about Fudan's international feel, the casual physical openness I experienced on a bicycle in 2012 no longer applies — visitor access to Chinese campuses generally, Fudan included, is tighter today than it was then, and that shift says something about the country, not just about this one university.
- Degree recognition back home. Whether a Fudan degree transfers cleanly into recognition or licensure elsewhere depends entirely on the field and the destination country. This page will not generalize an answer it can't verify for your specific case.
- Visa and residency rules. General direction only, never a guarantee — confirm directly with the university and your own country's authorities.
- What I haven't verified. A clean current international-enrollment headcount (separated from exchange/visiting figures), the specific HSK threshold for the Chinese-medium bachelor's track, and exact 2026 application deadlines all stay marked open until sourced directly — not filled in with a borrowed or approximate number.
- Go straight to the source. For current admissions, language, and program details, Fudan's own official site and its International Students Office are the authority — not this page, not an agency, not a forum.
I rode a bicycle through this campus once, on a Saturday in 2012, because nothing was stopping me. I never went back to test whether I still could. That's not a complaint about Fudan specifically — it's the honest, dated distance I'm writing this page from.
Before you go
Get the next city, when it's ready
One short email when a new guide goes live — the real numbers, and the life behind them. Written by someone who lives in China and does the math in yuan.
No spam. One click to unsubscribe.
06 — The rest of Shanghai's universities
Fudan isn't the only one
Two other schools round out the same university district I once rode a bicycle through, each deserving its own full treatment as this guide grows:
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Founded in 1896, SJTU is Fudan's closest peer in Shanghai and a fellow C9 member — ranked 47th globally in the 2026 QS rankings, with a School of Medicine widely regarded as rivaling Fudan's own, and admits students from close to 100 countries across roughly 60 undergraduate programs open to international applicants.
Tongji University
Founded in 1907 with German academic roots, Tongji is China's leading school for architecture, urban planning, and civil engineering — a legacy of its origins as a German-medicine and engineering school, and still the closest thing Shanghai has to a design-and-built-environment flagship.
Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE)
Founded in 1917, SUFE is the oldest dedicated finance-and-economics university in China and a direct thematic echo of Shanghai's own market-city identity — ranked among the world's top 50 for finance by subject, with a compact, specialized international program of under 500 international students from roughly 87 countries.
These deserve their own full treatment. Coming as this guide grows.
If you're considering it
Before you apply to Fudan
- Confirm the language of instruction and the interview format for your specific program directly with the International Students Office — Fudan's global brand doesn't mean English-medium by default.
- Budget for Shanghai's cost of living honestly — the city piece linked below explains why a single average figure understates what you'll actually pay, depending on which Shanghai you end up living in.
- Ask about degree recognition in your home country and field before you commit, rather than after you arrive.
- Treat every admissions number in this guide as dated the moment it's published. Confirm current figures, deadlines, and language requirements directly with the university.