Beijing Gets Its First BASIS Campus, in Shunyi's Biggest New Build

A new school year has opened in Beijing with a campus most of the city's established operators will find difficult to match in scale. BASIS Bilingual School Beijing, according to the BASIS International Schools network, welcomed its first students this August at a 100,000-square-metre site on the north side of Anfu Street in Houshayu, Shunyi District, the first BASIS campus in China's capital. The total investment in the campus stands at 1.1 billion RMB.

The school opens with grades Pre-K to 9 and is designed to grow into a full Pre-K to Grade 12 school, with capacity for 2,300 students. Boarding facilities for 800 pupils are built into the campus, a feature that is unusual for the Shunyi market and one that positions the school to recruit families from across northern China rather than from the district alone. Day enrolment is open to resident international families and to affluent local Chinese families with children in the bilingual track.

A campus designed to signal permanence

The facilities are built for a school that expects to fill out quickly. The campus includes a 400-metre running track, a heated swimming pool, two black-box theatres, a main theatre with full production capability, advanced science laboratories, specialist arts and music rooms and a cafeteria. Mark Sylte, founding head of school, has described the campus's dual-language model as central to its design from the ground up, with Chinese-medium instruction running in parallel with the network's internationally recognised academic curriculum rather than operating as a supplementary strand.

For Shunyi families, the question will be how quickly BASIS can build a results record. The district already hosts long-established international campuses from recognised brands, and families who enrolled in the founding cohort will be watching university placement data closely once the first senior students reach Grade 12.

Part of a twin opening

The Beijing school opened alongside BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou, a second new campus in Haizhu District that brings capacity for 1,900 students. Together the two schools bring the BASIS network in China to 15 campuses, the first time the group has opened two major sites simultaneously. The Beijing campus is notable as the network's first foothold in the capital, a market that operators have historically found more regulated and harder to enter than the southern cities where BASIS has its longer-established presence.

The dual opening reflects broader momentum in China's bilingual education segment. With full foreign-curriculum delivery tightly regulated on the mainland, the bilingual model has emerged as the format that operators and parents can agree on. Schools combining internationally recognised content with substantial Chinese-medium instruction have attracted the majority of new private investment in the sector over the past three years, and Shunyi, with its established international family base, is now attracting a second wave of large-scale openings alongside its existing cohort of international-passport-only schools.