The school is headquartered in Quanzhou, Fujian, a famous hometown of overseas Chinese in China. It has two campuses, Quanzhou and Xiamen, with a total area of 2.26 million square meters and a construction area of 970,000 square meters. There is an overseas Chinese education base in Barcelona, Spain.

Huaqiao University was founded by the Overseas Chinese Committee in 1960 under the direct care of Premier Zhou Enlai. It is a national key construction university and a key construction university in Fujian Province.

It is a multi-disciplinary comprehensive university in China, mainly recruiting overseas Chinese, young people from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan provinces. Huaqiao University is one of the only two national overseas Chinese institutions of higher learning in China, and it is also one of the universities with the largest number of overseas Chinese, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan students and foreign students in China. The school is a national key comprehensive university, one of the first outstanding universities evaluated by the Ministry of Education, and the first university in New China to implement the board system.