Tsinghua University is nowhere near the same league as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the American Ivy League schools or Britain's Oxford and Cambridge universities in academic prestige, as several world rankings have indicated.
But it has produced many graduates who have shaken up China's political landscape.
Just as former US presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton graduated from Yale and President Barack Obama studied at Columbia and Harvard, a significant number of senior Chinese leaders are Tsinghua graduates. Two of the most prominent are President Hu Jintao and National People's Congress chairman Wu Bangguo .
However, unlike the American luminaries who studied business, law and the liberal arts, a disproportionate number of top Chinese leaders who went to Tsinghua were trained in the fields of science and engineering and are therefore commonly called technocrats.
Hu studied water conservancy engineering at Tsinghua from 1959 to 1965, and Wu graduated from its electronics department in 1967.
Fiery former premier Zhu Rongji, who retired in March 2003, studied electrical engineering there from 1947 to 1951.
The number of Tsinghua technocrats is so large that detractors, particularly those from equally prestigious colleges such as Peking University, routinely dismiss them as the 'Tsinghua clique'.