In 1956 summer, under the instruction of Premier Zhou Enlai, the inception of Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering ushered in the first higher education institution of electronic and information science and technology of China. CIRE was then created from the combination of electronics-allied divisions of three well-established universities: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Southeast University (then Nanjing Institute of Technology) and South China University of Technology. As early as the 1960s, it was ranked as one of the nation's key higher education institutions, which represents the importance of this university. In September 2001, UESTC was selected as one of the 39 research-intensive universities in China that gain special funding under "project 985" for developing into world-class universities. UESTC has been included in the state Double First Class University Plan as a Class A Double First Class University. As such, UESTC is now considered a famous university in China.

Today, UESTC has developed into a multidisciplinary university directly reporting to the Ministry of Education, which has electronic information science and technology as its nucleus, science and engineering as its major field, and incorporates management, economics, medicine and liberal arts. UESTC has more than 3,000 faculty members, of whom 8 are academicians of CAS & CAE, 325 full professors, and 483 associate professors, 21 IEEE Fellows, 121 "Thousand Talents Program" recipients, and 15 Elsevier highly cited scholars.