Overseas Bases and the Global Network

This article belongs to the "Wild History of HKU · The University of Hong Kong (HKU) Unofficial History Archive", Module 09 (Internationalisation). It focuses on the University's presence beyond the Hong Kong campus — overseas and mainland offices, centres and innovation hubs — and on the administrative structure that coordinates international affairs. Information is current as of June 2026, with additional verification on 10 July 2026 of the details of the founding of the HKU Beijing Centre and correction of an outdated address in an earlier version; founding dates and addresses follow the official primary sources. Some official summary pages (global.hku.hk/footprints) were unreachable during crawling; relevant entries have been reconstructed through cross-checking other independent official pages, as noted.

HKU's "global network" consists of two parts: ① the administrative bodies at the Hong Kong headquarters that coordinate international and mainland affairs (the Mainland Affairs Office, the International Affairs Office, and the Academic Liaison Office); and ② the physical bases across mainland China and overseas (centres, innovation hubs, offices). This article follows that division. The three Shenzhen entities (the hospital, the research institute and the Business School's Shenzhen campus) and the proposed Shenzhen campus are covered separately in greater-bay-area-and-national-role.md; the global partner network is covered in global-partnerships.md.

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# 1. Administrative bodies coordinating international/mainland affairs

# 1.1 The Academic Liaison Office (ALO) and its units

According to the Academic Liaison Office (ALO) website^※, the ALO oversees the International Affairs Office and the Mainland Affairs Office, the Summer Institute, the Visitor Centre, and the Campus Store, among others. The offices of the International/Mainland Affairs Offices are located on 9/F of the Knowles Building on the main campus.

# 1.2 The Mainland Affairs Office (MAO)

According to the Mainland Affairs Office (MAO) website^※, the MAO was established in 2002 to promote academic exchange between HKU and universities and educational institutions in mainland China. Its main functions include: building cooperative relationships with mainland universities and institutions, providing information on mainland affairs and facilitating two-way exchange, building research networks between HKU and mainland institutions, and showcasing HKU's strengths to enhance its global standing.

What exactly does the MAO do? According to the MAO "Mainland Engagement" page^※, its work falls into four strands: ① Teaching and learning — developing cross-cultural learning opportunities with mainland partners; ② Research and knowledge exchange — leveraging research facilities in both Hong Kong and mainland China to advance frontier research; ③ University alliances — nurturing inter-institutional collaboration and promoting staff and student exchange; ④ coordination of HKU-Shenzhen Hospital (serving as a teaching hospital that provides an integrated platform for clinical services, research and education; see greater-bay-area-and-national-role.md). In addition, the MAO administers several academic exchange funding schemes, including the "K.C. Wong Education Foundation" grants for lectures, seminars and academic conferences, the "Sino-British Fellowship Trust" supporting academic visits between Hong Kong and the UK, and the "HKU Academic Exchange Scheme" funding exchanges between HKU and scholars in mainland China and Taiwan. Together, these three schemes are the MAO's concrete instruments for people mobility, complementing its macro function of "building cooperative relationships".

# 1.3 The International Affairs Office and the Global Lounge

The International Affairs Office coordinates outgoing student exchange, hosting of inbound exchange students, and internationalisation activities. According to the building history on HKU's Development & Alumni Affairs Office website^※, the Global Lounge is located on the ground floor of the Fong Shu Chuen Amenities Centre on the main campus, serving as a hub for student mobility, cultural exchange and international activities. The scale of the exchange network coordinated by the International Affairs Office (over 380 partner institutions across 46 countries/regions) and global internship pathways are detailed in the companion articles global-partnerships.md and hku-paris-and-overseas-platforms.md; this article does not repeat those figures, focusing on the administrative structure itself.

# 1.4 The Summer Institute and the Visitor Centre: two further ALO business lines

According to the ALO website^※ section layout, besides the International and Mainland Affairs Offices, the ALO also oversees the Summer Institute and the Visitor Centre: the former offers short summer courses to students from around the world and serves as one of HKU's shop windows for classroom teaching; the latter receives delegations from overseas institutions and visiting groups, acting as the "front line" of HKU's external relations. These two business lines sit alongside the Mainland Affairs Office and the International Affairs Office, together forming four administrative tracks under the ALO serving different constituencies (mainland institutions, overseas exchange students, summer visitors, touring groups). The "administrative body coordinating international/mainland affairs" described in Section 1 is thus an umbrella structure with multiple parallel lines, not a single department.

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# 2. Mainland offices and centres

The entries below for mainland bases are partly reconstructed from cross-checking official summary materials against the bases' own official pages. Where specific building addresses are involved, the official/primary disclosures of each base take precedence.

# 2.1 The HKU Beijing Centre: when was it founded, and where?

Short answer: The HKU Beijing Centre was officially established on 14 January 2021, with an opening ceremony on 9 April of the same year. It is located on the fifth floor of the Asia Financial Centre in Beijing — the landmark building that houses the headquarters of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) — with a floor area of approximately 1,822 square metres.

⚠ Correction note: An earlier version of this article stated that the Beijing Centre was located in "Yucheng Mansion" and did not indicate its founding year. Following multi-source verification this time against the official HKU Business School pages and official press releases, that statement was found to be erroneous — the Beijing Centre is in fact located at the Asia Financial Centre (Chinese-language materials also use the name "Yujia Mansion", a different rendering of the same building complex). The record is hereby corrected.

According to the HKU Business School "About the HKU Beijing Centre" official page^※, the Centre's address is "No. 27 Beisihuan Middle Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing", in the same building as the AIIB headquarters, surrounded by international financial, commercial and cultural institutions. The Centre's positioning is "rooted in Beijing, connected to Hong Kong, embracing the world", dedicated to strengthening cooperation between Hong Kong and mainland China in academic research and industry practice, and providing internationalised educational services and lifelong-learning platforms for a wide range of talent. Its specific functions include: hosting high-level conferences and forums; supporting the research and teaching activities of the HKU Business School (including MBA and DBA programme delivery); organising study visits for students to government departments and commercial organisations; providing customised training and internationalisation consultancy; and facilitating alumni exchange.

According to the Business School's launch press release^※, the opening ceremony drew over 170 guests, including HKU staff, students and alumni, MBA/DBA participants, the AIIB's Chief Economist, and the Dean of Tsinghua University Law School, among others. HKU President Professor Xiang Zhang addressed the ceremony, describing the Beijing Centre as an innovative learning platform for HKU in a "new era, new development and new landscape"; the Dean of the HKU Business School, Professor Hongbin Cai, said the Centre's establishment "sets a good example for academic exchange and cooperation between Hong Kong and mainland China". The Centre was established during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — the official account frames it as an embodiment of HKU's spirit of "rising to challenges and keeping pace with the times", marking a new milestone in the University's development.

# 2.2 Shenzhen bases (detailed in a separate article)

HKU operates three main entities in Shenzhen — HKU-Shenzhen Hospital (2012), the HKU-Shenzhen Institute of Research and Innovation, HKU-SIRI (2011), and the Business School's Shenzhen campus (Futian) — along with the proposed integrated "HKU (Shenzhen)" campus (Nanshan, 2021 MOU). The founding dates, scale and accreditation of these bases are detailed in greater-bay-area-and-national-role.md; this article does not repeat them.

⚠ Source unavailable / no supplementary record: The official HKU "HKU Around the World / Footprints" summary page (global.hku.hk/footprints) was unreachable across multiple crawl attempts. As for the individual addresses of other mainland offices such as the one in Shanghai (Hongkou District), this site was unable to fully verify them from a single official primary page, so only those bases confirmable via independent official pages are recorded (the Beijing Centre and the three Shenzhen entities); the rest await the restoration of the official summary page and will be added then. Addresses are not extrapolated from tertiary sources.

# 2.3 Shanghai bases: the 2026 "four bases" layout (supplementary record)

According to an official HKU press release of February 2026^※, HKU held a series of "HKU@Shanghai" events from 28 February to 1 March 2026 to celebrate its 115th anniversary, and simultaneously announced four strategic bases in Shanghai:

• HKU Shanghai Headquarters (Bund 22): housed in a century-old heritage building on the Bund, positioned as a hub for HKU's global alumni connections and a collaborative platform linking scholars, students and entrepreneurs in Shanghai and Hong Kong;
• HKU Zhangjiang Base: located in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Science City, extending the reach of the Faculty of Computing and Data Science from Hong Kong to Shanghai, with interdisciplinary research institutes in intelligent computing, future electronics and materials manufacturing;
• HKU Caohejing Base: located in the Caohejing Hi-Tech Development Zone, focused on frontier interdisciplinary research, driving the industrial translation of research outcomes and attracting research talent;
• Bund SOHO Base: managed by the HKU Business School, adjacent to the Shanghai Headquarters and positioned as an international platform for research, innovation and business collaboration, specialising in fintech, digital intelligence and startup incubation.

According to the press release, the overall positioning of this "four bases" layout is to enable HKU to embed itself deeply in the national development agenda — advancing technology, education and talent development — while retaining its identity as an international academic institution. This framing echoes closely the logic of HKU's Greater Bay Area presence (the three Shenzhen entities, see greater-bay-area-and-national-role.md), constituting the latest link in the University's three-tier mainland network of "Hong Kong base — Greater Bay Area bases — Yangtze River Delta bases".

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# 3. Overseas innovation hubs

# The HKU–Tel Aviv Innovation Hub (HKU-TLV)

According to HKU Business School news^※ and the HKU-TLV official website^※, the HKU–Tel Aviv Innovation Hub was officially launched on 1 August 2022 in Tel Aviv, Israel, at 2 Weizmann St., Tel Aviv. The Hub serves as the HKU Business School's "arm" extending globally, aiming to deepen cooperation between the academic, business and technology communities of Israel, Greater China and Hong Kong, and to promote cross-border collaboration. It runs immersive innovation programmes of three days to several weeks for senior business executives and upper-year students, taught by Israeli academic experts, government representatives, startup founders, venture capitalists and multinational corporate executives.

# What programmes exactly does HKU-TLV run?

According to the HKU-TLV website "Programs" page^※, the Hub's programme portfolio spans three categories — entrepreneurial practice, business methodology and industry topics — with the following core programmes for senior executives and upper-year students:

Source: HKU-TLV website programmes page^※; specific session schedules and places are subject to the latest announcements on the official website, and this site does not undertake to promise application outcomes.

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# 4. International research collaboration (overview)

HKU's international research collaboration with overseas institutions, according to the HKU official "International and Mainland Collaboration" page^※, takes forms including collaborative research projects, visiting professorship and joint doctorate programmes. Specific joint laboratories, international research centres and projects vary from year to year; the mechanisms and partner network are covered in global-partnerships.md. This site does not list them exhaustively, so as not to fall out of step with the University's disclosures for the current year.

This article's position: the existence, founding dates, addresses and functions of bases and institutions are verifiable institutional facts; but the specific list of "international research collaboration" projects changes year by year and falls under the remit of individual faculties and research divisions. This article offers only an overview, and readers should defer to HKU's official disclosures for the relevant year.

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# 5. Quick FAQs

# How many kinds of "bases" does HKU have in mainland China and overseas in total?

Based on the verification in this article and its companion articles, four tiers can be identified: ① administrative bodies at the Hong Kong headquarters (ALO, MAO, International Affairs Office); ② physical bases in mainland China (Beijing Centre, three Shenzhen entities, four Shanghai bases); ③ overseas business innovation hub (HKU-TLV); ④ autonomous alumni chapters and internship pathways (alumni chapters in the UK, US, etc., CEDARS global internships; see hku-paris-and-overseas-platforms.md). The four tiers differ in nature, affiliation and governance, and should not be conflated — for a detailed discussion, see Section 1, "What exactly does 'HKU expanding overseas' mean?", of that article.

# Which was established earlier: the Beijing Centre or the Shanghai bases?

Shanghai, by far. HKU's first physical base in Shanghai — the Faculty of Architecture's Shanghai Study Centre — was built in 2008; the Beijing Centre was not formally established until 2021, a full 13 years later. This reflects the sequence of HKU's mainland strategy — "Yangtze River Delta first, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei second" — as detailed in the "Shanghai Study Centre" section (Section 2) of hku-paris-and-overseas-platforms.md.

# Is HKU-TLV the same in nature as the mainland/Hong Kong bases?

No. The Beijing Centre and the four Shanghai bases all have academic teaching and alumni networks as their primary functions and fall under the HKU Business School or the Faculty of Computing and Data Science; HKU-TLV, by contrast, is a commercial innovation training platform. Its courses target corporate executives and entrepreneurs, and its fee structure is closer to professional training than to degree programmes; it does not award HKU degrees. What the three have in common is that they were all spearheaded or deeply engaged by the HKU Business School in their external expansion, making that faculty the most active in HKU's "base expansion".

# Why was the Beijing Centre sited in the "Asia Financial Centre" building?

This site has found no dedicated official explanation from HKU on this point, but indirect clues can be observed from public facts: the building houses the headquarters of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and is surrounded by international financial and commercial institutions, and the site aligns with the HKU Business School's positioning, which centres on MBA/DBA programmes and finance- and business-focused training. This is a reasonable inference by this site based on public information, not an official statement; readers should distinguish between "verified facts" and "reasonable inferences" — wherever this article involves the latter, it is flagged as such and not conflated with official accounts.

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# 6. Cross-references

• Global partner network and international alliances → global-partnerships.md
• Item-by-item verification of membership in U21, APRU and other international alliances → universitas-21-and-global-alliances.md
• Student exchange, joint/double degrees, summer study → exchange-and-joint-programs.md
• Shenzhen Hospital, Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen campus, proposed integrated campus → greater-bay-area-and-national-role.md
• Shanghai Study Centre, four Shanghai bases, overseas alumni chapters, CEDARS global internships → hku-paris-and-overseas-platforms.md
• Belt and Road scholarships and related international programmes → hku-belt-and-road-scholarship.md

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