Most finance universities are known for economics or business. Xi’an University of Finance and Economics is known for statistics, a discipline that runs through everything it does and links it to the agency that co-builds it: the National Bureau of Statistics of China. The university was formed from two schools founded in the early 1950s, the Northwest Trade School of 1952 and the Xi’an Statistics School of the National Bureau of Statistics of 1954, and statistics has been its signature ever since.
Now a university of four campuses, in Chang’an, Yanta and two nearby sites, it covers about 1,600 mu, roughly 107 hectares, at the foot of the Qinling Mountains and beside the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda. About 19,600 full-time students study in 13 schools, taught by a faculty of more than 1,230 that includes 78 national and provincial experts.
The university holds seven first-level and 15 professional master’s programs, with statistics designated a Shaanxi first-class discipline. Its 48 undergraduate programs include 12 national first-class programs, and it has passed three rounds of national undergraduate teaching evaluation, most recently in 2023.
Research is organized around the region and the profession. The university runs 16 provincial and ministerial research bases, including the China (Xi’an) Silk Road Research Institute and the Xi’an Statistics Research Institute, and it hosts training bases for the Ministry of Education’s education statistics staff and for the National Bureau of Statistics. Over five years its faculty has undertaken more than 2,400 research projects, 800 of them at national and provincial level.
International ties reach 94 universities in countries from Germany to Malaysia, including cooperative programs with universities in Germany, the United States, Russia and Britain. Students come from all 31 provincial regions of China, and the university’s graduates have kept a first-choice admission rate averaging 85 percent.
It is the numbers, not the name, that have always defined this university. Seven decades on, Xi’an University of Finance and Economics still teaches what its founders did: counting China’s economy, one statistic at a time, now as a provincial school co-built with the statistics agency itself.
Data Source: XAUFE Official Website (as of 2026)
