The Yenching Academy (YCA, also Yanjing Academy or Yanjing College; , pinyin: Yānjīng Xuétáng) is a postgraduate college of Peking University, located in Beijing, China. It hosts the Yenching Scholarship, a fully funded prestigious global scholarship program, designed "to cultivate leaders who will advocate for global progress and cultural understanding." The academy offers Yenching Scholars, selected annually from around the world, with full scholarships for one or two years of study leading to a master's degree from Peking University.
Inspired by the classical Chinese academies or shuyuan and the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, Yenching Academy at Peking University will compete with the younger Schwarzman College program at Tsinghua University in China and similar global scholarship programs around the world.
Yenching Scholarship
The Yenching Scholarship program is a two-year fully funded global leadership program designed to provide outstanding young scholars with a broad interdisciplinary postgraduate education that reflects global perspectives. During their studies, Yenching Scholars will live in Yenching Academy, a residential college of Peking University, built specifically for the program and modeled on those at Harvard and MIT in the United States and Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
The Yenching Scholarship provides students at Yenching Academy with full funding for their studies including tuition fees, accommodation, transportation, travel, and a living stipend. Annually, around 125 Yenching Scholars are chosen through a highly competitive selection process that seeks future global leaders. The acceptance rate for the most recent cohort is 2.7 per cent. Yenching Scholars are "a diverse group of talented young leaders who demonstrate academic excellence, leadership, innovative thought, and a commitment to the betterment of society." Successful applicants are elite students who have an excellent academic record and demonstrate outstanding leadership potential. Approximately 65% of the 100 inaugural scholars are international students while the remaining 35% are from mainland China. The academy's first cohort of Yenching Scholars were from a number of prestigious universities, with the most numerous coming from Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Chicago, Stanford, and Yale. Scholars represented 36 countries and regions, from Armenia and Australia to Vietnam and Zimbabwe.
With the arrival of its newest 6th cohort, the program has now hosted students of well over 60 different nationalities. The cohorts consisted of an almost equal distribution of Asian, European, North American, and Southern Hemisphere students. Among the students of the 6th cohort, 40 are from Asia, 4 from Africa, 22 from North America, 20 from Europe, 4 from South America, 1 from Oceania, 1 from the Middle East. The current president of the General Student Union (GSU), Yenching Academy's democratically elected student representatives, is Zecha Mpemba from Kenya.
Yenching Program
Curriculum
Studies at Yenching Academy are divided into mandatory core modules and electives. The core modules are "China in Transition", "Field Study", "Topics in China Studies Lecture Series", and "Compulsory Language Courses". Native Chinese are required to take additional courses in politics and foreign language. The electives are mostly divided into several research areas.
Yenching Academy allows students to pursue a degree in one of 6 different majors. The available majors are "Politics and International Relations", "Economics and Management", "Law and Society", "Philosophy and Religion", "History and Archaeology", and "Literature and Culture". Courses from these fields can be combined freely based on the scholar's research interest. The final degree depends on the topic chosen for the research thesis written and defended in year two.
Yenching Academy offers a host of Yenching-specific courses and electives for the scholars taught by Yenching faculty members selected across the Peking University campus and abroad (for example, He Yafei, the Former Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs of China, currently teaches a Yenching course on Chinese diplomacy). Yenching scholars are also offered a wide range of courses from most other schools and departments at Peking University, including Guanghua School of Management, National School of Development, as well as joint programs like the LSE-PKU Master in International Affairs. For scholars with a Chinese proficiency of HSK6, this also extends to courses taught in Chinese.