The China Import and Export Fair, better known as the Canton Fair, has opened in Guangzhou every spring and autumn since 1957, and for 54 of those years Guangdong University of Foreign Studies has supplied its interpreters. The university counts the volunteer tally at 60,000 students and teachers, a measure of how closely the campus is woven into the city’s business with the world.
The university itself was born of a merger. Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Languages, founded in 1964 and one of 36 institutions then directly under the national education commission, joined in 1995 with Guangzhou Institute of Foreign Trade, set up in 1980 under the foreign trade ministry, to form Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. A financial college was absorbed in 2008.
What the merger brought together was breadth. Today the university offers 77 undergraduate programs in 33 foreign languages, the largest language portfolio in southern China, and its foreign language and literature discipline has ranked among the top three nationally in recent evaluations. Three first-level doctoral programs in foreign languages and literature, applied economics and law sit beside two professional doctorates in translation and law.
General social science ranks in the ESI global top 0.5 percent, with engineering, environment and ecology, and economics and business in the top 1 percent. About 21,000 undergraduates, 6,700 postgraduates and 1,650 international students from 99 countries study in Guangzhou, taught by 2,145 staff, and the university has graduated about 350,000 people who now keep 111 alumni branches across five continents.
The international record is unusual even by Guangdong standards: the only foreign-language institution in the Asia Campus, seven Confucius Institutes overseas, and partnerships with 536 universities and institutions in 71 countries and regions.
Translation runs through the university’s history, from the interpreters of the Canton Fair to the alumni negotiating trade deals in a dozen languages. For a city built on commerce, a school that teaches the world’s words is not an ornament but a utility.
Data Source: GDUFS Official Website (as of 2026)
