58 Business The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020
2 with the government, which still domi-
nates the commanding heights of China’s
economy. Few students, many of whom are
in their mid-30s, with a startup or two un-
der their belt or some other real-world ex-
perience, think that would be useful. As en-
trepreneurs, they know far more about
dealing with officials than any professor
can. But they are still keen to learn how to
make the most of regulations. This “policy
dividend”, as one prominent dean calls it,
is “embedded in everything that we teach”.
Not all divergences from Western mbas
are so subtle. Mr Chen is changing Antai’s
syllabus to organise courses by industry—
with modules on fintech, health care, self-
driving cars and other thriving Chinese in-
dustries—rather than by discipline (ac-
counting, marketing and so on), as in the
West. ceibs’s Beijing campus is located in
the capital’s Zhongguancun district, which
is China’s answer to Silicon Valley.
Above all, students want professors to
teach case studies on home-grown firms,
not some “old Southwest Airlines case”, Mr
Ding explains. “It’s even worse if you bring
up ge.” Instead, they want to know how
Western theories apply to China’s buzzy
native firms. Schools are churning out new
local cases about firms such as Ichido, a 20-
year-old bakery chain, or Luckin Coffee, a
Starbucks wannabe set up in 2017. ceibs
leads a consortium of a dozen or so Chinese
institutions aimed at creating common
criteria to write them.Wealth management
Like mba students everywhere, Chinese
ones expect the degree to confer advan-
tages besides pure knowledge. One is a
boost to career prospects. Graduates of
Western schools typically double their pre-
mba pay. Antai and Fudan University’s
School of Management, also in Shanghai,
triple it (albeit from a lower base and ad-
justed for living costs). Both boast near-
perfect job-placement rates. ceibs runs a
course for corporate human-resources
managers on how to make the most of their
graduates.
Many business schools now also run
startup incubators to help students with a
clever idea for a business. Some graduates
co-found startups. Fellow alumni also ben-
efit from the schools’ unusually close ties
to China’s leading entrepreneurs. A stamp
of excellence from a leading school is a
good way to impress deep-pocketed do-
mestic investors. A Chinese mba has be-
come “one of the real secrets of entre-
preneurs’ success”, observes Rupert
Hoogewerf, compiler of the Hurun Rich
List, a Who’s Who of the ultra-wealthy.
A chance to rub shoulders with captains
of China’s private sector is a big draw even
for seasoned executives. Ye Kai, a serial en-
trepreneur from Shanghai who runs a res-
taurant chain and a group of urban skischools, and who attended an executive
mbain the late 2000s, says he still meets up
with old classmates every other month.
ceibs claims to have the “largest and
most prestigious network” of alumni in
China—over 22,000, including more than
3,000 chief executives. Among them are
Dong Mingzhu of Gree, a maker of air-con-
ditioners, and Richard Liu of jd.com, a big
e-merchant. In Beijing the Cheung Kong
Graduate School of Business, founded in
2002 by Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong’s richest
tycoon, claimed in 2016 that former stu-
dents ran one-fifth of the 103 Chinese firms
then in the Fortune Global 500 list of the
world’s biggest corporations by revenue.
They included Jack Ma, the now-retired
boss of Alibaba, China’s e-commerce titan
and its largest listed firm. The local press
has dubbed the school “the rich club”.
Members certainly enjoy rich benefits. Jia
Yueting, founder of LeEco, an indebted
tech giant, was able to rustle up $600m
from about a dozen classmates in 2016.
But graduates say that the network’s
true value lies in the intangible perks that
other groupings do not offer. “In the class-
room entrepreneurs are allowed to be
weak, and nobody will look down onthem,” explains Ms Zhao of Whichmba.net.
“Classmates tell you the truth.” Mr Ye
thinks that, in terms of trust, it has no
equivalent in China’s business world.
Members swap inside details which they
would normally never share, he says. After-
hours get-togethers can be especially use-
ful to compare notes on delicate subjects
like dealing with officials or state-run
firms. There is “no textbook to manage this
kind of relationship”, says Mr Ye.
Given all these blessings, going abroad
for an mba is increasingly seen as a “huge
opportunity cost” by Chinese students,
says Mr Chen. In some sectors it can be a li-
ability, by keeping them out of China’s fast-
changing market for too long. Henry Zhan,
a 29-year-old manager at Fangduoduo, a
booming online service connecting home-
buyers and sellers, chose ceibsover top
American schools because of its ranking
and popularity among Chinese property
moguls (including Fangduoduo’s foun-
ders). He thinks ceibs’s 428,000 yuan
($60,000) tuition fee, excluding a monthly
boarding fee of $400, will be a better in-
vestment than Columbia Business School,
which he also considered, and which
would set him back well over $100,000.Luring laowai
Foreign students are taking note. Even as
international applications fell at seven out
of every ten American business schools in
2018—in part because of stricter visa re-
quirements—Asian schools reported a 9%
rise in the number of applicants. Demand
has risen for immersive Chinese modules
taught in China itself. ceibsrecently edu-
cated a crop of South Korean executives
from Hyundai, Japanese ones from Toyota
and French from Michelin and Total. Al-
ready over a third of its mba students are
foreign. Rose Luo of insead(which opened
a campus in Singapore in 2000) says that
several Western schools have enhanced
their offerings with double degrees, popu-
lar with domestic and overseas students
alike—and boosted the prestige of their
Chinese partners. She runs one in Beijing,
at Tsinghua University’s School of Eco-
nomics and Management.
The chasm in quality between China’s
most prominent schools—Tsinghua’s
counts the bosses of Tesla, Microsoft and
Facebook among its board members and,
since last year, Tim Cook of Apple as chair-
man of its advisory committee—and its
dozens of hangers-on is much wider than
in the West, Ms Luo notes. Those unable to
get into the best Chinese schools may
prefer a decent one abroad. Some of the
most ambitious executives at Chinese
firms going global will still often plump for
a renowned Western institution. But with
the rise of ceibs, Tsinghua, Antai and oth-
ers, the decision is no longer the no-
brainer it once was. 7Up, up and MBA
Number of accredited business schools
in mainland ChinaSource:AACSBInternational *ToFebruary12th3020100
20*1917151311092007