Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen — guide for international students

Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen (哈尔滨工业大学（深圳）, HITSZ) is not a separate university. It is one campus of Harbin Institute of Technology, founded in Harbin in 1920, built jointly with the Shenzhen municipal government. The campus history page dates the partnership to a cooperative agreement of May 2001; the Ministry of Education approved the HIT Shenzhen Graduate School in February 2002, alongside the Tsinghua and Peking University graduate schools in the same University Town. Undergraduate education was first proposed in a 2009 memorandum, the first 376 undergraduates enrolled in September 2016, and the Ministry authorised undergraduate education in July 2017, with the campus formally constituted as 哈工大（深圳） on 26 October 2017. HITSZ describes itself as the first high-level campus in Shenzhen run by a Project 985 and Double First-Class Class A university with a complete bachelor’s–master’s–doctoral structure, and it recruits Chinese undergraduates under its own admission code, 18213.

The campus profile page gives the scale: over 14,000 full-time students, of whom more than 7,500 are undergraduates and close to 7,000 master’s and doctoral students, plus over 200 postdoctoral researchers; more than 700 full-time faculty and nearly 90 adjunct faculty, with 162 faculty appointments to national talent programmes. Teaching is organised into four colleges — Informatics, Artificial Intelligence, Frontier Sciences and Future Studies — comprising 14 schools and four research institutes, with a School of Marxism alongside. The same page counts 30 first-level disciplines across eight categories, including eight national key first-level disciplines, 15 disciplines rated Class A in China’s fourth national discipline assessment and eight Double First-Class construction disciplines.

The campus is in Shenzhen University Town, Taoyuan Subdistrict, Nanshan District, sharing the district with the Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School and the Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. The present site was delivered in August 2018: 93,200 square metres of land, 298,500 square metres of floor space. In September 2025 the university and the city signed a further agreement to support the campus’s development.

One distinction matters more here than at a single-site university. HIT has three campuses — Harbin, Weihai and Shenzhen — and each runs its own international admissions. Everything in this guide is the Shenzhen campus: its own prospectus, its own application system at hitsz.at0086.cn, its own deadline and its own scholarship schedule. An application to one campus is not an application to another. The second thing to know is that every degree HITSZ offers international students is taught in English: the 2026 prospectuses set English-proficiency requirements, never mention HSK, and list no Chinese-taught option.

HITSZ admits international students to bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees, all taught in English, through its own system at hitsz.at0086.cn rather than through HIT’s Harbin channels. For the 2026 intake the degree application window ran 30 December 2025 to 20 May 2026; the Future Design School, which runs the design master’s degrees, used a separate window of 1–30 May 2026. Chinese Government Scholarship applicants worked to an earlier calendar — 1 November 2025 to 31 December 2025 for the first stage, 20 February 2026 for the second — and applied on the CSC system as well as to HITSZ. Age limits are set per level: under 25 for undergraduate applicants, under 35 for master’s, under 40 for doctoral. The feature that sets HITSZ apart from most Chinese universities is the undergraduate entrance examination: a compulsory online test in English, 45 minutes of mathematics for everyone plus 15 minutes of physics for engineering majors. The China Scholastic Competency Assessment (CSCA) sits alongside it rather than replacing it — CSCA results are on the document list, and the admission section says the decision rests on both scores where CSCA scores exist and on the entrance examination alone where they do not. Graduate applicants take a college-set assessment instead: a written test, an interview or both. Note what is not required — no HSK at any level, because no degree here is taught in Chinese. Note also what has not appeared: no 2027 prospectus was on the admissions pages when this guide was checked, so every date below belongs to the 2026 cycle and shows the shape of the calendar rather than a deadline you can still meet.

Degree programs

Select a degree level to see tuition, duration and entry requirements.

Non-degree programs

Documents to prepare

Application timeline

These are the dates Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen published for the 2026 intake. That cycle has closed. Use them as a guide to when each step falls in the year, and check the official pages for the 2027 dates before you plan around them.

Funding at HITSZ comes in three layers running on three calendars, and that is what costs applicants money. The Chinese Government Scholarship is applied for first, between 1 November 2025 and 31 December 2025 or 20 February 2026 depending on the stage — months before the degree deadline. The HITSZ Entrance Scholarship needs no separate form: the prospectuses state that its application is integrated with the admission application, so applying for admission is applying for it. The Shenzhen and Guangdong government awards come last, in windows the prospectuses put at roughly April–May and June–September, so they are decided after you have been admitted. HITSZ publishes no quotas for the government awards, only that places are limited, and the Chinese Government Scholarship notice states that applicants may not hold two scholarships at once.

Research at HITSZ is organised around the industries on its doorstep, and the published record is unusually well quantified. The campus lists 84 research platforms at all levels, of which 22 are provincial or ministerial and 59 municipal, and says it is building a cluster of key laboratories including five national-level key laboratories run on the "one laboratory, two campuses" model with Harbin, plus three academician platforms. Ministerial platforms include Ministry of Industry and Information Technology key laboratories in micro-nano optoelectronic information systems, printed electronics and intelligent networking for dedicated wireless communication, a Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development innovation centre, and a Ministry of Emergency Management laboratory for network and data security. The applied side is larger still: substantive cooperation with more than 1,400 enterprises and public institutions, close to 3,000 key technical problems solved, over RMB 900 million in contracted industrial research funding received and more than 60 joint laboratories with companies. HITSZ’s English research pages give an older cut of the same picture — over 800 companies and 59 joint laboratories worth over RMB 87 million — so where the two disagree, the Chinese page is the more recent.

HITSZ describes its international strategy as "in-situ internationalisation" — building an international environment on the Shenzhen campus rather than sending everyone abroad. The concrete parts are a foreign-trained faculty (more than 80% of full-time teachers have spent a year or more studying or working at universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Australia or Singapore), an English-language curriculum that makes every international degree here English-taught, a Bay Area research centre for global competence built with the China Education Association for International Exchange, and a "Global Governance and Sustainable Development" minor. Outbound, the campus says it has set up more than a hundred overseas exchange and study programmes with world-class universities, sends faculty on more than 270 overseas exchange visits a year, and holds more than a hundred national, provincial and municipal international cooperation projects. It publishes no named list of partner universities on its Chinese or English pages, so if a particular partnership matters to you, ask the International Affairs Office rather than relying on third-party lists.

HITSZ publishes graduate outcomes campus-wide rather than by nationality, and they are worth reading before you choose a city: the campus reports having educated more than 33,000 students in total, with graduates working mainly in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area and the Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai regions, over 60% of them taking jobs in the Greater Bay Area and more than 70% of those employed joining well-known companies such as Huawei, Tencent and Mindray. Graduates have founded over a hundred companies, 89% of them technology firms and 85% registered in Shenzhen. None of that is broken out for international graduates, and HITSZ publishes no placement rate or salary data for its international cohort, so treat any such figure you find elsewhere as unsourced. The practical support is the careers portal at job.hitsz.edu.cn, with job and internship listings, a recruitment calendar and employer announcements; it is published in Chinese, which is worth knowing given that your degree will have been taught in English. A Chinese work visa after graduation is also a separate matter from your student residence permit, and the campus’s visa guidance covers study status only.

The campus is in Shenzhen University Town, Taoyuan Subdistrict, Nanshan District, on a site delivered in August 2018 with 298,500 square metres of floor space on 93,200 square metres of land, shared with the Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School and the Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School. Accommodation is the part of student life HITSZ is least specific about, and the wording is the same in all three 2026 prospectuses: first-year undergraduates and first-year master’s students may apply for university accommodation in quad or triple rooms, beds go on a "centralized opening for reservation, first-come-first-served" basis, availability is limited and a place cannot be assured, and students must vacate before the end of the summer vacation following their first year. Doctoral students arrange their own housing unless they hold a Chinese Government Scholarship, which covers the dormitory fee. After admission you complete the Application Form for Student Apartment in Shenzhen University Town within one week before registration and email it to the recruitment officer in the International Affairs Office. Insurance is compulsory: comprehensive medical and accident cover from Ping An for the whole period of study at RMB 800 per year, without which a student cannot begin or continue study. The policy reimburses 85% of outpatient costs above RMB 650, with a daily outpatient limit of RMB 600 and a cumulative maximum of RMB 20,000, at designated hospitals only.

Accommodation

Dining

HITSZ does not publish canteen locations, opening hours or meal prices for international students on its English pages, and the Housing & Dining page covers only the apartment application form. The campus is part of Shenzhen University Town, which runs shared student catering, and the 2026 International Student Handbook carries a campus services section covering the library, health care and leisure facilities — ask the International Affairs Office for current arrangements and budget for food separately until you arrive.

Facilities

Reach the International Affairs Office, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen — international student admissions for questions about applications, documents, scholarships and arrival. Type university programs and offices are based on campus in Shenzhen.