Central South University

Central South University was formed in 2000 by merging three institutions, and the combination is unusual: a medical school, a railway university and a mining and metallurgy institute under one name. It is a Project 985 institution in Changsha with around 58,000 students. All three lineages connect to Kazakhstan. The metallurgy and mining provision, inherited from Central South University of Technology, matches the Kazakh extractive sector. The railway engineering, from Changsha Railway University, matches the China-Europe freight corridors. And Xiangya medical school, founded in 1914 with the Yale-China Association, is among the strongest in China. That breadth means an applicant should identify which part of the university they are applying to, since the three have different reputations, different languages of instruction and different graduate outcomes. Changsha living costs sit well below the coastal cities.