Jinggangshan University carries the name of the Jinggang Mountains, the range in western Jiangxi where the Chinese revolution took hold, and its students recently built a world-first lithium extraction device for salt-lake brines, an invention that won a national innovation competition. The pairing sums up the school: rooted in a famous mountain region, and reaching for the newest technologies.
The university was founded in 1958 in Ji’an, went through mergers and several name changes, and was restored under its present name in 2007. It began graduate education in 2011, won formal master’s degree rights in 2021, and in 2024 entered the province’s list of key doctoral-degree cultivation units. It is jointly supported by the Jiangxi government and the education ministry, and it has a standing partnership with Tongji University in Shanghai, which dispatches faculty and runs an annual academic week on campus.
Three campuses cover 2,459 mu, about 164 hectares, serving 28,000-plus full-time students through 52 undergraduate programs across ten fields of study. Fourteen master’s authorization points, including eleven professional categories from clinical medicine to tourism management, support the graduate side, with four national first-class programs and two provincial first-class disciplines in Marxism theory and biology anchoring the academic structure.
Research has risen fast: the school’s 100 platforms include an education-ministry key research base and a key laboratory co-built with the national surveying and mapping administration, 141 national research projects have been funded since 2021, and the faculty published its first paper in Nature that year, with three more in Nature journals since. Joint laboratories with Tongji University and the Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology carry the innovation drive further.
A faculty of 1,790 full-time teachers, including 132 professors, is reinforced by more than 60 visiting and honorary professors, among them academicians Xiao Wei and Ouyang Ziyuan. Abroad, the university cooperates with 59 universities in 18 countries and runs a Chinese language teaching center with a partner university in India.
Six decades into the climb, Jinggangshan University keeps adding to the ledger: a Tongji partnership, a Nature paper and a world-first lithium device, alongside the name it inherited from the mountains. The range gave the school its identity; the school has kept earning the view.
Data Source: JGSU Official Website (as of 2026)
