Nine Universities Alliance, referred to as C9 or C9 Alliance, is the first university alliance among the top universities in China, which was officially launched in June 2009. The members of the alliance are the first batch of first-class universities in the "985 Project", including 9 universities including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Fudan University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Nanjing University, Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China and Xi Jiaotong University.