Soviet specialists at Tsinghua University in the 1950s

In the early 1950s, China turned to the Soviet Union for help in restructuring and reorganizing higher education institutions across the country. Tsinghua University was one of the places where Soviet specialists were active. From 1952 to 1960, 65 Soviet experts from 26 Soviet institutions (universities and research institutes) worked at the university. Soviet specialists were distributed among various faculties and departments of Tsinghua University, performing work on building laboratories, organizing diploma projects, training graduate students and young teachers, giving lectures, preparing teaching materials, and writing textbooks. With their help, Tsinghua University was transformed from a comprehensive Western-style university into a Soviet-style polytechnic university. By 1960, the university had completed the transition from “general education” to “integration of various specialties with industrialization” and trained a large number of technical specialists for China. Soviet experts played an important role in transforming Tsinghua University into an important platform for scientific, technical, educational and cultural exchanges between China and the Soviet Union.