On May 4, several thousand people, including Chinese leaders such as President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, gathered at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to celebrate the centennial of the foundation of Peking University. Some 80 presidents of the world's leading universities also joined in the celebrations.

According to a Chinese press release on May 4, "Jiang praised Beida's glorious traditions of patriotism, progress, democracy, and science, and its fine academic style, which have embodied the national spirit of self-reliance and exploration." Beida is a widely used nickname for the university. The university is also known as Beijing University--although Peking University is the name used on staff business cards and promotional literature put out by the university.

A billboard at Peking University displays a diagram of new science buildings under construction (at left) and congratulates the university on its centennial (at right).

Photo by Michael Freemantle

May 4 is a significant date for the institution. The university was the birthplace of the May 4th Patriotic Movement in 1919, which is widely recognized as a watershed in contemporary Chinese history. On that day, teachers and students at the university marched "at the forefront of the anti-imperialist and patriotic struggle," as a Peking University brochure puts it. Their slogan was "science and democracy."

It is noteworthy that the students who protested in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, carried placards marked with "Mr. Science" and "Mr. Democracy." That demonstration, which was crushed by the Army on government orders, demanded democracy and an end to official corruption. The student leaders included several from Peking University, among them history student Wang Dan, who was exiled to the U.S. in April this year.

Founded in 1898, the university was the first state-owned comprehensive university in modern China. It is known as the cradle of Marxism and communism in China. It was where Marxism was first studied in the country, and it was an important base for the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s. Of the first 53 members of the Chinese Communist Party, 21 were from the university. They included Mao Zedong, who was then a campus librarian.

The university now has eight colleges, 39 departments, 52 research institutes, and 63 cross-disciplinary research centers. The university also has China's largest university library--with more than 4.5 million books--and the largest number of laboratories--116.

The department of chemistry, founded in 1910, is the oldest chemistry department at a Chinese university. The College of Chemistry & Molecular Engineering at the university now is made up of several departments, institutes, centers, and laboratories spanning all the main branches of chemistry.

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