China’s law schools often trace themselves to a single founding moment, and this one traces itself to a cave in Yan’an. Northwest University of Political Science and Law began as the Shanbei Public School in 1937, a cadre school created during the war against Japan, and its lineage runs through the Yan’an University merger of 1941, a move to Xi’an in 1949, and a series of reorganizations that ended in 2006 with its present name. It is one of the five universities and four institutes, known in Chinese legal education as the wu yuan si xi, that have dominated law teaching for decades.
The school’s modern form began to take shape in 1958, when the law department of Northwest University merged with the Central Cadre School for Political and Legal Affairs’ northwest branch to form the Xi’an Institute of Politics and Law, the first higher law school in northwest China. Renamed Northwest Institute of Politics and Law in 1963, it was dissolved during the Cultural Revolution and restored in 1978, taking the university name in 2006.
Today the university enrolls nearly 13,000 undergraduates and about 5,300 postgraduates, taught by more than 1,000 full-time faculty. It holds a first-level doctoral program in law, with nine second-level doctoral programs, plus a professional doctorate in law, seven first-level master’s programs and nine professional master’s categories across 31 undergraduate majors, seven of them national first-class programs.
The university was among the first in the country selected for the outstanding legal talent cultivation plan and hosts a national innovation base for training legal professionals for foreign affairs. Its experimental teaching center is a national demonstration center for legal education, and it runs 17 national first-class courses. Research strength is concentrated in law: a national human rights research center, a legislative contact point of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and ten provincial research platforms.
Internationally, the university has partnerships with more than 110 universities and institutions in nearly 20 countries and regions, running over 90 joint talent cultivation programs. Seven majors pair law with a second discipline, including joint bachelor’s programs in German, Russian and Japanese plus law with Xi’an International Studies University.
What began as a cadre school in a Yan’an cave in 1937 is now the law university of the northwest, its over 200,000 graduates spread through the courts, prosecutors’ offices and legislatures of modern China. The path from the Shanbei Public School to a national law school ran through war, relocation and several reorganizations, and the university that emerged still carries the name it earned along the way.
Data Source: NWUPL Official Website (as of 2026)
