HONG KONG — While there are plenty of academic institutions looking to enter China, the University of Macau is taking a more radical approach: It is abandoning its current campus and relocating entirely to Zhuhai, just across the mainland Chinese border.

That means moving 10,000 students and faculty, 650,000 books and about 60 laboratories. But what is most striking is that the new campus will be governed by the laws of Macau, not Beijing, despite its location.

Macau, like Hong Kong, is a former European colony that returned to Chinese rule in the 1990s, but is governed semiautonomously. The two cities have their own currencies, passports and border control, as well as freedoms like uncensored Internet access.

When classes start in September, the University of Macau’s new campus — still under construction on about a square kilometer, or roughly 250 acres, on Hengqin Island in southern Guangdong Province — will be “handed over” to Macau governance in accordance with a 2009 bill by the National People’s Congress in Beijing.