38 years, 600,000 fertility visits a year, and the birth of mainland China's first IVF baby
To walk into the Reproductive Medicine Centre of Peking University Third Hospital in northwestern Beijing is to step into the place where mainland Chinese reproductive medicine began. The centre was built in the 1980s by Professor Zhang Lizhu, the obstetrician-gynaecologist known as the "mother of the Chinese test-tube baby", and on 10 March 1988 her team delivered mainland China's first IVF baby, a girl named Zheng Mengzhu. The hospital's IVF centre has been operating at the leading edge of the field ever since. Today, by clinical volume, the centre is the largest reproductive medicine service in China and one of the largest in the world: more than 1.79 million outpatient fertility visits across the most recent three-year reporting period, more than 52,000 fresh IVF cycles across the same period, and more than 28,000 minimally invasive fertility-related procedures. In the 2024 Fudan Hospital Specialty Reputation Rankings, the centre was named China's leading reproductive medicine unit.
The centre's role in the country is not just clinical. It is the host of the National Clinical Research Centre for Obstetric and Gynecologic Diseases (Reproductive Health), the lead unit of the National Expert Group on Quality Management of Assisted Reproductive Technology, and the Beijing Quality Control and Improvement Centre for Human Assisted Reproductive Technology. That set of designations gives the centre a function in Chinese reproductive medicine similar to the one Fuwai plays in cardiology: it treats the most difficult cases, writes the national guidelines, runs the national quality programme, and trains the national workforce.
What the place actually looks like
Where most fertility centres in the world are organised around a single technology (IVF, ICSI, egg freezing, PGT), the Peking University Third Hospital centre is organised around the full chain of reproductive medicine. Its clinical services cover the complete range of assisted reproductive technology: conventional in-vitro fertilisation, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD/PGT), assisted hatching, in-vitro maturation of oocytes, blastocyst culture, and oocyte cryopreservation. Its clinical disease areas extend from reproductive failure and pregnancy-related disease, through fetal-origins disease, into fertility preservation, and the safety and new-technology research that underwrites all of these.
That structural choice — a single centre that handles every step from diagnosis through ART through fertility preservation, with the country's largest clinical volume attached — is the operational reason the centre has been able to lead the Chinese field for nearly four decades. A patient who walks in with a fertility concern can be diagnosed, treated with the full range of assisted reproductive technology, and if needed offered fertility preservation, all by the same team on the same campus.
Why it became No.1
Three factors explain the centre's grip on the Fudan ranking. First, the historical first-mover position: mainland China's first IVF baby in 1988, first donor-egg IVF baby, first frozen-thawed embryo IVF baby, and the world's second "three-freeze" IVF baby were all born at this centre. Each of those firsts created a clinical and research dataset that no other Chinese centre can match. Second, a research output that is difficult to equal in any other Chinese clinical department: the centre has developed MARSALA, an internationally first-of-its-kind PGD method, and produced the world's first MALBAC baby; the centre has performed PGD for more than 200 single-gene diseases and exported the technology to more than 50 partner centres in other countries; the centre's research has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Nature, Science, and Cell, and has been selected twice for China's "Top Ten Scientific Advances". Third, a generational handover of clinical leadership that has kept the institution at the cutting edge of each new technology in turn — from conventional IVF to ICSI to PGT to MALBAC — under the current leadership of Academician Qiao Jie, who succeeded Professor Zhang Lizhu as the centre's clinical and scientific lead.
That history matters for international patients because it is the reason the centre is the only Chinese institution whose embryo-screening technology is used in more than 50 partner centres abroad. The number of patients in any given rare single-gene-disease subcategory is small enough that only a national-scale centre can build real expertise, and the Peking University Third Hospital centre is the only Chinese institution that operates at that scale.
What this means for international patients
For a foreign patient considering IVF or PGT in China, the Peking University Third Hospital Reproductive Medicine Centre is the place that handles the cases the rest of the country refers out. The centre runs an international patient office and a multilingual case-coordination service. It is the host of the National Clinical Research Centre for Obstetric and Gynecologic Diseases (Reproductive Health), which means its clinical protocols are the de facto standard for fertility care in Beijing and a reference for the rest of the country. The hospital's wider campus includes the Peking University Health Science Centre, which means international patients benefit from the depth of the wider university hospital system in handling the complications that sometimes accompany fertility treatment.
The centre's specialty areas are anchored to internationally recognised strengths: IVF/ICSI (where its annual cycle volume is the largest in China and one of the largest in the world), PGT/PGT-M (where its MARSALA method is one of the internationally adopted embryo-screening technologies), and fertility preservation (where the centre's oocyte cryopreservation programme is the largest in China). The centre is at 49 Huayuan Beilu, Haidian District, Beijing. This profile is editorial information based on the sources linked below, not treatment advice; individual outcomes depend on the patient's age, the diagnosis, the team, and the cycle.