Huainan Normal University is known for a teaching program with an unusual name. The Yanliu model sends student teachers to poor rural schools to take up real classroom posts, a practice recognized by the Ministry of Education as a model project and now the Yanliu model of the school’s identity: a normal university that does its most important teaching in the countryside.
The school began in 1958 as a teachers college in the coal city of Huainan, absorbed two other local institutions in 1999, and was elevated to undergraduate status as Huainan Normal University in 2000. In 2024 it became a key master’s-degree cultivation unit of Anhui.
Fifty undergraduate programs, one of them holding national first-class status with sixteen more rated first-class at provincial level, serve about 18,000 students on a campus of roughly 77 hectares. Two provincial key disciplines and sixteen research platforms support the academic structure.
Competition results belie the school’s modest size: a national gold medal in the Chuangqing youth entrepreneurship contest, a grand prize in the Siemens Cup intelligent manufacturing challenge, and a first prize in national mathematical modeling, among more than 240 national awards. The research record includes 35 national science and social-science projects and two hundred invention patents.
Its 1,092 full-time teachers, ninety-five percent of them holding doctorates or master’s degrees, link the school to partners in Britain, the United States, Germany, France, Italy, Korea, Singapore and beyond, including universities in Hong Kong and Taiwan, with student exchanges running in both directions.
For a school that trains teachers, the best classrooms are sometimes the ones that need a teacher most: that is the insight behind the Yanliu model, which Huainan Normal has kept from its 1958 teachers-college days to its master’s-track present.
Data Source: HNNU Official Website (as of 2026)
