In 1941, the Russian Language Team in the Third Branch of the Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese Military and Political College was established. It was later renamed the Foreign Languages School of the Central Military Commission under the direct leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the school was administered by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was renamed the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute in 1954 and merged with the Beijing Russian Institute in 1959. Since 1980, the institute has been directly administered by the MOE. In 1994, it took on its current name, Beijing Foreign Studies University.

Today, BFSU teaches 101 foreign languages. It houses China's largest non-general language teaching cluster that offers courses in some less commonly taught European, Asian and African languages, as the first of the MOE's special teaching programs. While best known for its excellence in foreign languages and literature, BFSU has also launched programs in fields such as humanities, law, economics, management and education. It now offers courses in languages including (in chronological order) Russian, English, French, German, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Japanese, Arabic, Cambodian, Lao, Singhalese, Malay, Swedish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Swahili, Burmese, Indonesian, Italian, Croatian, Serbian, Hausa, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, Korean, Slovak, Finnish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish, Greek, Filipino, Hindi, Urdu, Hebrew, Persian, Slovenian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Irish, Maltese, Bengali, Kazakh, Uzbek, Latin, Zulu, Kyrgyz, Pashto, Sanskrit, Pali, Amharic, Nepalese, Somali, Tamil, Turkmen, Català, Yoruba, Mongolian, Armenian, Malagasy, Georgian, Azerbaijani, Afrikaans, Macedonian, Tajiki, Tswana, Ndebele, Comorian, Creole, Shona, Tigrinya, Belarusian, Maori, Tongan, Samoan, Kurdish, Bislama, Dari, Tetum, Dhivehi, Fijian, Cook Islands Maori, Kirundi, Luxembourgish, Kinyarwanda, Niuean, Tok Pisin, Chewa, Sesotho, Sango, Tamazight, Javanese and Punjabi. To better serve China’s diplomatic efforts, it teaches the official languages of the 183 countries that have established diplomatic relations with China.