Four educators and economists opened an accounting school in Changsha in 1933 and called it Housheng, a name that stayed with the institution through decades of retitling. Hunan College of Finance and Economics, as the school is known today, still carries that founding subject: the business of public money, taught with the province’s finance department as one of its supervisors.
The school passed through a long chain of names, from a private accounting school to a provincial finance school, before the tax and finance authorities took it over in 1951 and made it public. It became a finance and economics junior college in 1985, was elevated to undergraduate status under its present name in 2010, entered the province’s first-class enrollment line in 2020, and in 2021 won approval as a master’s-degree cultivation unit of Hunan.
Economics and management anchor the curriculum across eight fields, with 51 undergraduate programs led by six national first-class programs in accounting, finance, financial management, taxation, international economics and trade, and computer science, plus 11 more rated first-class at provincial level. Seventeen schools and colleges serve some 25,000 undergraduates, and 85 graduate students are trained jointly with Xiangtan University and Hunan Normal University.
Research punches above the school’s name. Five disciplines rank as provincial applied-distinctive fields, four provincial key laboratories and a collaborative innovation center support the base, and the journal Economic Geography, published by the school, has ranked among China’s most internationally influential academic journals for 14 consecutive years. In 2023 the school led 16 national social science fund projects, placing it first among China’s colleges for that year, and it has completed more than 2,000 research projects in the past three years.
A faculty of 1,662, including 469 with doctorates and 80-plus master’s supervisors, teaches a student body recruited from 29 provinces. Graduates track the school’s fiscal lineage: over 70 percent stay in Hunan, 15-plus percent enter the province’s tax, finance and banking systems, over 30 percent are hired by large state-owned enterprises and institutions, and the school has produced more than 100,000 graduates since 1933.
Ninety years separate the accounting school of 1933 from a university of 25,000 students, and the thread between them is unbroken: the province’s finance department still supervises the school, its graduates still fill tax offices and banks, and its international ties now reach over 40 universities abroad. The name Housheng is gone, but the founding subject is not.
Data Source: HUFE Official Website (as of 2026)
