47 years, 15 subspecialties, and 15 straight years as China's No.1 lung department
To walk into the Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine of the First Affiliated Hospital of Guangzhou Medical University, on the banks of the Pearl River, is to step into the institution around which Chinese respiratory medicine was built. Its research arm, the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health, was founded in 1979 as the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Disease — the first dedicated respiratory-disease research institute in China — and has been led ever since by Academician Zhong Nanshan, the respiratory physician who led China's clinical response to SARS in 2003 and to COVID-19 in 2020. In the 2024 Fudan Hospital Specialty Reputation Rankings, the department was named China's leading respiratory unit for the fifteenth consecutive year, with the highest reputation score in the specialty. It has also led the Chinese hospital science-influence rankings in respiratory medicine for ten consecutive years.
The department's role in the country is not just clinical. It is a key component of four national platforms: the National Respiratory Medicine Center, the State Key Laboratory of Respiratory Disease, the National Clinical Research Center for Respiratory Disease, and the national programme for the diagnosis and treatment of medically intractable respiratory disease. That set of designations gives the department a function in Chinese respiratory medicine similar to the one the National Cancer Center plays in oncology: it treats the most difficult cases, runs the national research programme, writes the specialty's guidelines, and trains its workforce.
What the place actually looks like
Where most respiratory departments in the world are organised around a handful of common diseases — asthma, COPD, infection — the Guangzhou department runs fifteen defined subspecialty groups: COPD, asthma and respiratory immunology, thoracic oncology, pulmonary infection, sleep-disordered breathing, pulmonary vascular disease and pulmonary vascular intervention, interstitial lung disease, respiratory critical care and rehabilitation, rare respiratory diseases, pleural and mediastinal disease, interventional pulmonology, bronchiectasis, paediatric respiratory disease, and chronic cough. The clinical team includes one academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, two national distinguished experts, and five recipients of the State Council special allowance, under department director Professor Li Shiyue.
That structural choice — a single department that covers every respiratory condition, common and rare, medical and interventional and critical, across adult and paediatric patients — is the operational reason the department has kept the Fudan No.1 ranking for fifteen consecutive years. A patient who walks in with an undiagnosed lung disease can be worked up across the full subspecialty range, from bronchoscopy and interventional diagnosis to sleep studies and pulmonary vascular assessment, without leaving the department.
Why it became No.1
Three factors explain the department's grip on the Fudan ranking. First, the historical first-mover position: the 1979 institute was the country's first dedicated respiratory research institution, and its founding director, Academician Zhong Nanshan, has led the specialty's national agenda for nearly five decades — including the 2003 SARS response, when his team's early clinical work defined the outbreak management, and the 2020 COVID-19 response, when his public confirmation of human-to-human transmission changed the global course of the pandemic response. Second, an unmatched national platform density: the department is the only Chinese respiratory unit that simultaneously anchors the national medical centre, the state key laboratory, and the national clinical research centre for the specialty. Third, a research output that has shaped the country's respiratory epidemiology — the department's national studies on COPD and asthma prevalence redefined the scale of chronic lung disease in China, and its teams have received the National Science and Technology Progress Award and the National Science and Technology Progress Award for Innovation Teams.
That history matters for international patients because respiratory medicine is a specialty where rare and difficult cases concentrate at exactly one place per country — and in China, that place is this department.
What this means for international patients
For a foreign patient considering respiratory treatment in China, the Guangzhou department is the place that handles the cases the rest of the country refers out. The department's internationally recognised strengths are COPD and asthma (where it defines the national standard of care), thoracic oncology (working alongside the hospital's nationally ranked thoracic surgery programme), interventional pulmonology (one of the highest-volume bronchoscopy and interventional programmes in the country), interstitial and rare lung disease, and pulmonary vascular disease. The hospital's main respiratory campuses are on Yanjiang West Road in Yuexiu District and Qiaozhong Middle Road in Liwan District, Guangzhou, and it runs an international patient service through the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Health network.
The department is led by Academician Zhong Nanshan, recipient of the Medal of the Republic, China's highest state honour. This profile is editorial information based on the sources linked below, not medical advice; individual outcomes depend on the disease, the stage, the team, and the patient.