Southern Medical University

Guangdong’s medical powerhouse — military medical heritage since 1951, clinical training in fifteen hospitals

Southern Medical University (SMU) was founded in 1951 as a medical school of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, became the First Military Medical University, and was transferred to Guangdong Province in 2004 under its present name. It is a Guangdong high-level university built almost entirely around medicine and life sciences, teaching some 14,000 undergraduates and 7,600 graduate students across the Guangzhou main campus in Baiyun District and the Shunde campus in Foshan. SMU ranks third among Chinese medical universities in the 2026 ShanghaiRanking, holds fifteen disciplines in the ESI global top one percent — led by Clinical Medicine and Pharmacology & Toxicology — and hosts the State Key Laboratory of Organ Failure Research, a national platform very few medical universities operate. Its clinical strength comes from fifteen affiliated hospitals, including Nanfang Hospital and Zhujiang Hospital, both selected for Guangdong’s high-level hospital construction program, which gives international students an unusually large teaching-hospital network for rotations. More than 1,000 international students from 114 countries study here, most of them in the six-year English-taught MBBS program at CNY 45,000 per year, in a Cantonese-speaking city that anchors the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area health and biotechnology industry.