The medical school of Xi’an was built to serve the countryside. Xi’an Medical University, founded in 1951 as the Shaanxi Provincial Health Technical School, has spent seven decades sending doctors into the smaller cities and counties of Shaanxi, and it is now the province’s main training ground for grassroots medicine, with its own research institute for rural health and a journal devoted to the subject.
The school became a junior college in 1994, an undergraduate university in 2006, and a master’s degree-granting institution in 2024. Over 15,000 full-time students study across its three campuses in Hanguang, Weiyang and Gaoxin, which cover about 775 mu, roughly 52 hectares, in 16 teaching units offering 20 undergraduate programs, two of them national first-class.
Clinical training runs through six affiliated hospitals, three of them grade A tertiary, plus 33 teaching hospitals. The affiliated provincial people’s hospital is a national training base for general practitioners and emergency medicine, and the first affiliated hospital hosts the only national key general practice training base in Shaanxi.
Research follows the school’s clinical and rural mission. Three disciplines, clinical medicine, pharmacology and toxicology, and biology and biochemistry, rank in the ESI global top 1 percent, and the university hosts three provincial key laboratories and a national drug clinical trial institution. Its faculty of about 1,270 includes more than 350 with doctorates and one recruited academician.
The university’s signature is rural health: it founded the Shaanxi Rural Medicine Research Institute, leads a grassroots medical alliance covering 167 primary care units, and has built four rural health stations while developing an AI-assisted diagnosis platform. Over 150,000 medical graduates have passed through the school, and most of its alumni work in Shaanxi, many in county hospitals.
Internationally, the university cooperates with over 30 universities and institutions abroad and joined the Belt and Road medical education alliance and the China-Russia medical university alliance. In 2026 the Ministry of Education approved its first Sino-foreign cooperative institution, the London City Health Academy, offering pharmacy and rehabilitation programs in a four-year model.
A provincial health school of 1951 is now a master’s-granting medical university with six affiliated hospitals, still doing what it was founded to do: put doctors where the countryside needs them. The rural health stations, the grassroots alliance and the AI diagnosis platform are all the same mission restated, seventy-five years on.
Data Source: XIYI Official Website (as of 2026)
