For more than half a century this institution trained doctors for the towns of Guangdong without the word university in its name. Zhaoqing Medical University, approved by the Ministry of Education in May 2024, traces its history to 1958, when a branch campus of Sun Yat-sen University’s medical school opened in Zhaoqing, a city on the northern tributaries of the Pearl River.
The road went through a higher vocational stage in 2004, when the school became a medical college, before the 2024 upgrade made it a full undergraduate university. The mission has stayed constant: the university says it trains medical workers for grassroots and rural healthcare, the people sent down, kept down and put to use, in the phrasing of its own materials.
Eight undergraduate programs now cover clinical medicine, nursing, pharmacy, traditional Chinese medicine, dental technology, medical imaging, rehabilitation therapy and food hygiene and nutrition, alongside 19 vocational programs. About 15,400 full-time students study on three campuses covering some 74 hectares, with 2,467 of them in undergraduate programs.
Under a motto of great medicine and sincere practice, the university has built 430,000 square meters of space holding 1.12 million paper books, with 230 million yuan invested in teaching and research equipment.
Three directly affiliated hospitals complete the training chain, led by a grade-A tertiary general hospital and a grade-A tertiary hospital of traditional Chinese medicine, both counted among Guangdong’s high-level hospitals.
A branch campus born in 1958 has spent 66 years becoming a university, and it did so by serving the patients other medical schools rarely see. Zhaoqing trains the doctors of county towns, and the county towns keep sending their students back.
Data Source: ZQMC Official Website (as of 2025)
