Xi’s School Fuels China AI Boom With More Patents Than Harvard

On a crisp afternoon in Beijing, the campus of Tsinghua University hums with the activity of the country’s top students in science and engineering. Badminton courts near the school’s east entrance echo with grunts and shouts. In a sleek new wing housing the Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence, the work is quieter but no less determined. Researchers, amid whiteboards dense with equations and the acrid smell of fresh paint, try to decode the inner workings of the human mind.

Tsinghua is buzzing these days. While the school has long been the nation’s leading institution for science and technology — ...