No other university in China carries both “Economics” and “Law” in its name. Zhongnan University of Economics and Law does, and the pairing is not decorative: the institution was created in 2000 by merging two schools that had spent the previous five decades on opposite sides of the same campus: Zhongnan University of Finance and Economics, an economics heavyweight, and Zhongnan College of Politics and Law, one of the country’s leading law schools. Sixty years after its two halves were born as separate institutes, the merged university has built its entire identity around the space where the two disciplines meet.
The family tree is tangled, and almost every branch traces back to one founding institution. In 1948, a university called Zhongyuan University opened in central China as the region’s first higher-education institution of the new era. Five years later, in the great reshuffling of Chinese universities in the early 1950s, its finance and law faculties were spun off into two separate institutes — Zhongnan Institute of Finance and Economics and Zhongnan College of Politics and Law. They went through mergers, splits, and name changes over the next half century before rejoining in 2000 under the present name. The history earned recognition along the way: the university entered the national 211 project in 2005, joined the 985 innovation platform in 2011, and has been named a Double First-Class university since 2017, with law listed as a national first-class discipline.
Today the university spreads across two campuses in Wuhan — Nanhu, beside the lake of the same name, and Shouyi, at the foot of the Yellow Crane Tower — covering about 187 hectares. More than 21,000 undergraduates study alongside 9,000 master’s students, 1,500 doctoral candidates, and 1,000-plus international students. Sixty-eight undergraduate programs are on offer, including 30 national first-class programs.
The defining feature is the fusion itself. Since 2000 the university has built what it calls the largest integrated curriculum system of economics, law, and management in China: some 400 courses that cross disciplinary lines, so a law student can graduate fluent in corporate finance and an economist can argue a tax case. Its seven doctoral programs and 18 master’s programs in first-class disciplines sit mostly in these overlapping fields, and a Museum of Chinese Monetary and Financial History on campus shows just how deep the economics tradition runs.
The law side carries serious weight beyond the classroom. ZUEL faculty have led the drafting or revision of upwards of 40 national laws, and its social science funding consistently ranks first among China’s economics- and law-focused universities, with over 1,800 major projects completed in the past decade. The journal Journal of Law and Business Studies, published at the university, ranks among the country’s leading law periodicals.
Internationally, the university cooperates with 100-plus universities and research institutions across over 20 countries, including a joint law-and-economics school with Sapienza University of Rome. Its motto, “extensive knowledge, rational thought, moral integrity, and social commitment”, reads like a job description for the kind of graduate it sets out to produce: someone who can think like a lawyer and count like an economist, and who has been trained to put both skills to public use. Twenty-five years after two rival schools agreed to share a name, that remains the bet the university is still making.
Data Source: ZUEL Official Website (as of 2026)
