68 years, a million cancer visits a year, 30,000 operations
To walk into the Cancer Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in the southeast of Beijing is to step into the operational centre of Chinese cancer medicine. The hospital was founded in 1958 as the country's first specialist cancer centre, originally named the Ritan Hospital, and it has been the institutional home of Chinese oncology ever since. In 2011 the State Council turned it into the National Cancer Center, an arrangement that gave one hospital the same role in cancer that Fuwai plays in heart disease and Tiantan plays in neurosurgery: it does not merely treat the most difficult cases, it writes the national guidelines, runs the national screening programmes, and trains the national workforce.
Today the hospital handles more than a million outpatient cancer visits a year and performs more than 30,000 cancer operations. It runs 13 clinical departments and 9 medical-technology departments on a 1,198-bed budget, with a faculty that includes five members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences or Chinese Academy of Engineering, 55 doctoral supervisors, and 104 master's supervisors. The National Cancer Center's statistical yearbook, the Report on Cancer Registration in China, is the official source on cancer incidence and mortality for the entire country. In the 2024 Fudan Hospital Specialty Reputation Rankings, the hospital was again named China's leading oncology department, a position it has held for more than a decade.
What the place actually looks like
Where most cancer centres in the world are organised around a single organ, the Beijing hospital is organised around every organ. The thoracic surgery department was the first of its kind in the country when it was founded in 1958, and remains the leading centre for lung and oesophageal cancer surgery under the leadership of the current hospital president, Academician He Jie. The abdominal surgery, breast, gynaecological, head-and-neck, and lymphoma departments each handle their cancer type at full national scale. The radiotherapy department, led by Professor Wang Lühua, is one of the largest radiotherapy platforms in Asia, with the country's leading concentration of intensity-modulated, image-guided, and proton-capable treatment capacity. The medical oncology department, led by Professor Wang Jie, runs the most active thoracic-oncology drug-development programme in the country and was the lead Chinese site for several of the practice-changing international trials of the past decade.
That structural choice — a single hospital that does every kind of cancer, in every kind of way, for every kind of patient — is rare. Most Western cancer centres are either organ-specific (MD Anderson's thoracic centre, Memorial Sloan Kettering's breast centre) or modality-specific (the major proton-therapy centres). The Beijing hospital is neither. A lung cancer patient who walks in can be screened by the thoracic surgeons, staged by the imaging department, discussed in a multidisciplinary tumour board that includes radiation and medical oncologists, and treated on the same campus by the same team across all five modalities: surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, interventional radiology, and biological or cellular therapy.
Why it became No.1
Three factors explain the hospital's grip on the Fudan No.1 ranking. First, the National Cancer Center designation, which no other Chinese hospital holds: the institution is simultaneously the country's cancer statistics office, its national cancer screening coordinator, its national quality-control centre, and the home of the only State Key Laboratory of Molecular Oncology in the country. Second, a research output that is difficult to match at any other Chinese institution: the 1995 inclusion of its oesophageal cancer field-prevention work in the national "top ten scientific achievements" is one example among many. Third, a generational handover of clinical leadership that has kept the institution at the cutting edge of each new therapy in turn — from open surgery to thoracoscopic surgery, from conventional radiotherapy to intensity-modulated and image-guided radiotherapy, and from chemotherapy to targeted therapy and immunotherapy.
That history matters for international patients because it is the reason the hospital treats cancers that other Chinese centres refer onwards. The number of patients in any given rare-cancer subcategory is small enough that only a national-scale centre can build real expertise, and the Beijing hospital is the only Chinese institution that operates at that scale in every cancer subcategory at once.
What this means for international patients
For a foreign patient considering cancer treatment in China, the National Cancer Center is the place that handles the cases the rest of the country refers out. The hospital runs an international patient office, an English-language website at cicams.ac.cn, and a multilingual case-coordination service. It is one of the World Health Organization's designated cancer research collaborating centres, and it has bilateral cancer-research relationships with the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Italy, Egypt, Iran, and Brunei, and multilateral cancer-control partnerships with Japan, South Korea, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mongolia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. The hospital's affiliated institutions extend the same model into the rest of the country — the Cancer Hospital's Shenzhen branch, its branch in Langfang, Hebei, and the larger network of provincial cancer hospitals it coordinates through the National Cancer Center.
The hospital is at 17 Panjiayuan Nanli, Chaoyang District, Beijing. This profile is editorial information based on the sources linked below, not treatment advice; individual outcomes depend on the cancer type, the stage, the team, and the patient.