Founded in 1996, the International Institute of Chinese Studies of Beijing Foreign Studies University (IICS-BFSU), formerly known as the Overseas Sinology Research Center, adopted its current name in 2015. In 2023, the Academy of International Communication of Chinese Culture was merged into IICS-BFSU. The institute is committed to promoting cultural exchange and mutual learning among civilizations, and strives to become a leading center for overseas Sinology and global Chinese studies, a high-level interdisciplinary think tank, and a multilingual, cross-cultural platform for international communication of Chinese culture.

Currently, the institute has 23 full-time faculty members, including eight professors, eight associate professors, and seven lecturers. Among them are four doctoral supervisors and 23 master’s supervisors. Their academic expertise spans literature, history, arts, journalism, and communication studies. In addition to Chinese, the working languages include 10 foreign languages. All faculty members hold doctoral degrees and have overseas study or work experience. The institute has also hosted over 100 international experts, including five long-term foreign scholars. Each year, it accommodates two to five postdoctoral researchers and visiting scholars.

IICS-BFSU houses four research divisions, namely the Research Division for Sinology and the History of Sino-Foreign Cultural Exchange, the Research Division for Global Chinese Studies, the Research Division for Comparative Literature, and the Research Division for the Global Communication of Chinese Culture. It recruits both master’s and doctoral students specializing in comparative literature and cross-cultural studies, and offers a master’s program in Chinese Studies for international students, with participants from 14 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

Since the beginning of the new era, the institute has undertaken three major national research projects, 21 annual projects funded by the National Social Science Fund, and 44 provincial or ministerial-level projects. It has also conducted 23 commissioned research projects and has been recognized multiple times as an outstanding research collective.

To date, researchers at IICS-BFSU have published more than 200 books, including 37 translations and 10 textbooks. Representative works include: Western Classics of Early Sinology, Contemporary Overseas Sinology Series, Studies in International Sinology, Mutual Learning of Civilizations: China and the World, The Vatican Library Collection of Documents on the History of Sino-Western Cultural Exchange During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Studies on the Overseas Dissemination of Chinese Classics in the 20th Century, and The Global Dissemination of Chinese Opera: Literature, Translation, and Research (10-volume series). The institute has also published The Analects of Confucius in Sinhala, Persian, and Bengali, as well as core works such as A Conceptual Lexicon for Classical Confucian Philosophy and A Sourcebook in Classical Confucian Philosophy.

IICS-BFSU publishes five academic journals: International Sinology, International Sinology Translation Series, International Journal of Chinese Studies, Studies in the History of International Chinese Language Education, and Cahier de la Chine. Together, they form a comprehensive publishing platform for Chinese studies in both Chinese and foreign languages. Among them, International Sinology, launched in 1995, is China’s first CSSCI-indexed journal dedicated to international Chinese cultural studies since the beginning of reform and opening-up.

The institute also hosts the Beijing Cultural Exchange Center, a key research center designated by the Beijing Municipal Key Research Centre for Philosophy and Social Sciences. It co-established the “World Sinologists Fellowship Base” with the International Confucian Association and collaborates with the Administration of the Old Summer Palace to run the Yuanmingyuan Research Center of IICS-BFSU.

In 2016, IICS-BFSU was listed as an A+ institution in the China Think Tank Index (CTTI). Its research outcomes have repeatedly won major awards for outstanding achievements in national high-end think tank projects and have received commendations from Party and State leaders.

The institute has established institutional partnerships with over a dozen overseas universities and organizations, maintaining regular academic exchanges and collaborative research programs. These include notable institutions such as Sapienza University of Rome in Italy, Université du Littoral in France, Saint Petersburg State University in Russia, the University of Hawaii and Queens Public Library in the United States, Laval University in Canada, as well as Visva-Bharati University and Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.

The institute also operates the Sinology Library, a branch of the BFSU Library, which is open year-round to readers from China and abroad. The collection includes 7,164 catalogued volumes, alongside hundreds of rare documents and key historical materials in both print and microfilm formats.