A Century-old Business School in a Millennium-old Educational Institution.
The Business School of Hunan University is located at the foot of the picturesque Yuelu Mountain and on the west bank of the Xiangjiang River. It inherits the millennium-old cultural heritage of the Yuelu Academy and promotes modern business education in China.
In 1911, its predecessor, the Hunan Public Instruction Institute for Commercial Teachers, was founded, which pioneered the establishment of an independent commercial discipline in the country. In 1912, it was renamed as the Hunan Higher School of Commerce, where Mao Zedong studied and was determined to "become a business expert" (as recorded in Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China). In 1926, Hunan University was officially named, and the Business Education of Hunan University was established, recruiting students nationwide. In 1946, the only National Business College in China was merged into it, and the Business College of Hunan University was founded. In July 2000, the Business School of Hunan University was officially established. A large number of outstanding educators such as Li Da, Cao Dianqiu, Hu Yuantan, Ren Kainan, and Yang Duanliu once taught here, and more than 100,000 excellent students represented by Mao Zedong, Xie Juezai, Peng Huang, Yi Lirong, and Gan Siqi were cultivated.
The school has two disciplines: Business Administration and Management Science and Engineering. It has two doctoral programs of first-level discipline, one professional doctoral program in accounting (among the first batch in the country), two post-doctoral research stations, and professional master's degree-granting programs such as Master of Business Administration (MBA), Executive Master of Business Administration (EMBA), and Master of Professional Accounting (MPAcc), forming a complete talent cultivation system from bachelor's to master's, doctoral, and post-doctoral levels. Six majors, including Business Administration, Marketing, E - Commerce, Information Management and Information Systems, Accounting (including ACCA), and Financial Management (including Financial Engineering), have been recognized as national first-class undergraduate construction majors, and the major of Big Data Management and Application was newly added in 2024.
The school actively practices the "Business +" education model, constructs an education system for digital-intelligent business talents with the concept of "Business + Humanities, Technology, Industry, Data, and Foreign Languages", and has won the first and second prizes of the National Teaching Achievement Award for three consecutive sessions. Student teams have won gold medals in national innovation and entrepreneurship competitions such as the "Internet +" and China College Students' Entrepreneurship Competition, grand prizes in the National Graduate Innovation Practice Series Competitions, and the gold medal in the finals of the First National College Students' Career Planning Competition.
The school serves the "Double First - Class" construction of the university and continuously increases the disciplinary influence. In the third and fourth rounds of discipline evaluations by the Ministry of Education, the Business Administration discipline ranked 12th and in the top 10% (A -) respectively; in the fifth round of discipline evaluation, both the Business Administration and Management Science and Engineering disciplines reached new historical heights. The Economics and Business discipline has repeatedly ranked among the top 1% globally in ESI and is around the 200th place in the world-class discipline rankings of US News, Times Higher Education, and ShanghaiRanking. In the ranking of the Business Administration discipline of Chinese universities by the Alumni Association, it stands first among universities in central and western China.
The school has established the national-level Key Laboratory of High-Performance Distributed Ledger Technology and Digital Finance, the Virtual Teaching and Research Office for Marketing, three Hunan Provincial Key Laboratories including "Enterprise Management and Decision-Making Support Technology", "Intelligent Decision-Making Technology for Emergency Management", and "Data Science and Blockchain". Additionally, it has established the Key Laboratory of Industrial Digital-Intelligent Finance of Hunan Province for Philosophy and Social Sciences, and the specialized think tank, "Hunan University Credit Research Center", which is among the first batch of its kind in Hunan Province.
The school has gathered a high-level teaching team spanning disciplines such as management, economics, information science, and mathematics. More than 60% of the teachers have studied, visited, or conducted research in Europe, America, and other places. It has a group of high-level talents, including the Innovative Research Group of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Innovation Team of the Ministry of Education, the national candidates of the " Hundred, Thousand, and Ten Thousand Project", the Youth Talents in Promoting Chinese Ideology and Culture recoginised by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPC, New Century Excellent Talents in Universities of China's Ministry of Education, National Famous Teachers, and National Leading Talents in Accounting (Taxation) by the Ministry of Finance.
The school adheres to the principle of open and cooperative education to cultivate first-class business talents with a global perspective and has successively obtained the three major international authoritative certifications of AMBA, AACSB, and EQUIS. It actively constructs an international cultivation system, jointly builds programs with world-class universities such as Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the University of Southern California in the United States; it has signed all-around cooperation agreements with 46 high-level universities in countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and France and established overseas academic exchange bases.
The school continuously strengthens the brand of "A Century-old Business School in a Millennium-old Educational Institution", focusing on fostering the "first-class business school" culture by integrating the different cultures from Yuelu Academy, Hunan University and the business world in a modern way. Adhering to the education principle of "Scale Business Heights, Pursue sustainable Commerce", the school has produced a large number of high - level cultural achievements and ideological and political projects, which have been recommended and reported more than 60 times by central news media such as Xinhua News Agency, People's Daily, Guangming Daily, and China Discipline Inspection and Supervision News.
Standing at a new developmental starting point, the School will uphold the great banner of socialism with Chinese characteristics, firmly maintain the central role of talent cultivation, fully implement the fundamental task of fostering virtue through education, adhere to the principles of "Unity of Knowledge and Action, Righteousness Leading to Far", and continuously enhance the quality of cultivating leading business and management talents with practical expertise and societal orientation in the new era. It will also comprehensively advance the construction of a world-class business school with Chinese characteristics, deeply rooted in historical and cultural heritage.
