What changed
Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine marked its 70th anniversary in Shanghai on 28 October 2026, with 30 new international traditional Chinese medicine standards released for the year.
The university also:
- launched a talent programme with the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, East China Normal University, Shanghai International Studies University, the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica and ShanghaiTech University;
- formed a strategic alliance with seven industry companies covering training, research and technology transfer.
Why it matters
This puts Shanghai at the centre of two practical efforts: deciding how traditional Chinese medicine is described internationally, and training people who can work across medicine, science and languages.
The ISO technical committee for traditional medicine has kept its secretariat at the university for 17 years. It brings together more than 40 member bodies across five continents and has now published 149 traditional-medicine international standards. Six overseas delegations attended the anniversary event, including representatives from South Korea, Germany, Spain, Australia, Nigeria and Italy.
The new standards could make cross-border teaching, research and cooperation easier, but their subjects, adoption status and implementation timetable were not specified. The talent programme is designed to connect traditional Chinese medicine with scientific training and international studies, while the company alliance gives that work a route toward technology transfer.
That is the more consequential shift: the university is presenting traditional medicine not only as inherited knowledge, but as an international field that needs shared rules, research partnerships and people able to translate between systems.
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