The China Medical University (CMU) was the first medical school established by the Chinese Communist Party. Its precursor was the Chinese Workers’-Peasants’ Red Army Military Medical School and Chinese Workers’-Peasants’ Red Army Health School which had been founded in Ruijin, Jiangxi in 1931. After the Long March with the Red Army, it was relocated to Shanbei.

In 1940, comrade Mao Zedong proposed, and the central committee of the Chinese Communist Party approved, the name of the school being changed to China Medical University. In July 1946, the university was ordered to enter northeast China with the army and reached Xinshan city (now Hegang city), Heilongjiang province. In November 1948, the whole northeast of China was liberated and the university was ordered to move to Shenyang. In 1948 and 1949, it absorbed the medical school formerly operated by the (Japanese) South Manchuria Railway (the South Manchuria Medical College, later called the Shenyang Medical College which had opened in 1911) and the Mukden Medical College (sometimes spelled Moukden Medical College) whose origins go back to 1892 when Dr Dugald Christie founded the Shenjing Medical School. In 1911/1912, this became a formal medical college, the Mukden Medical College.