For modern universities in China, becoming international has long meant to tread in Western steps in the face of the overweening West. Central to China's higher education development has been the promise of a successful synthesis of knowledge drawn from the best of China and West. As China's international engagement in higher education stimulates more and more local policies and reforms on a global scale, the Chinese idea of a university is placed highly on the research agenda within and outside the Chinese mainland. Reporting findings from a recent study funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, with empirical data collected through fieldwork at Peking University and Tsinghua University, this article reveals that combining the seemingly contradictory Chinese and Western ideas of a university is increasingly likely. The conventional binary positioning of Chinese and Western traditional ideas of a university in the literature needs to be rethought.