Xiamen University is the reason the city is on this list: strong in economics and finance, marine and environmental science, chemistry and the humanities, and home to a campus that is genuinely famous in its own right. The university sits by the sea on the island, which shapes the whole experience.
Xiamen itself is a clean, liveable coastal city across the strait from Taiwan, more international than most interior cities and unusually pleasant to live in. The trade-off is cost: it is the most expensive of the eastern cities outside Shanghai, and a tourist economy pushes everyday prices up. The cross-strait location also gives the humanities and Southeast Asian studies a regional weight that few campuses can match.