During the War of Resistance Against Japan, Peking University moved to Kunming, a city in Yunnan Province, together with Tsinghua University and Nankai University, formed the National Southwestern Associated University. In 1946, after the victory of the war, Peking University moved back to Beiping (then the name of Beijing). At that time, the university comprised six schools (Arts, Science, Law, Medicine, Engineering and Agriculture), and a research institute for the humanities. The total enrollment of student grew to 3,000 countries.

    After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the government carried out, in 1952, a  nationwide readjustment of colleges and universities with the aim to promote higher education and quicken the training of personnel with specialized knowledge and skill by the country's manpower and material resourses.
    After the readjustment, Peking  University became a university comprising departments of both liberal Arts and Sciences and emphasizing the teaching and research of basic sciences. By 1962, the total enrollment grew to 10,671 undergraduate students and 280 graduate students. Since 1949, Peking University has trained  for the country 73,000 undergraduates and specialty students, 10,000 postgraduates and 20,000 adult-education students, and many of them have become the backbones on all fronts in China.
    The document and service sharing system at PKU consists of Main library, 30 department libraries, a Medical School library, and 6 affiliated hospital libraries. The branch libraries hold more than one million volumes collection. Most of the branch libraries' collection can be retrieved through OPAC.
  Peking University is proud of its outstanding faculty, including 53 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), 7 members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), and 14 members of the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).
    The university has effectively combined research on important scientific subjects with the training of personnel with a high level of specialized knowledge and professional skill as demanded by the country's socialist modernization. It strives not only for improvements in teaching and research work, but also for the promotion of interaction and mutual promotion among various disciplines.
    Thus Peking University has become a center for teaching and research and a university of a new type, embracing diverse branches of learning such as basic and applied sciences, social sciences and the humanities, and sciences of medicine, management, and education. Its aim is to rank among the world's best universities in the future.