The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020 Business 57W
hen theChina Europe International
Business School (ceibs) was estab-
lished in Shanghai’s Pudong district in
1994, its campus abutted mostly non-
descript warehouses and tracts of marshy
farmland. Today the area is among the
city’s ritziest—and gives it its iconic sky-
line. ceibs, too, has become something of
an icon in the quarter-century since its
founding as a joint venture between the
European Union and the Chinese govern-
ment. Last month it held on to its fifth place
in the annual ranking of the world’s 100
best mbas by the Financial Times, a newspa-
per. Only heavyweights such as Harvard
Business School, Wharton, Stanford’s
Graduate School of Business and insead of
France scored better.
Business education in China is boom-
ing, and not just at ceibs. When the FT first
published its list in 1999, no Asian school
made the cut. This year 17 have done, nine
of them Chinese. Seven Chinese institu-
tions are among the 90 or so worldwide to
boast the coveted “triple crown” of accredi-
tations—from bodies in America, Belgium
and Britain. In 2012 the American one,
aacsb International, accredited 13 Chinese
schools, seven of them in Hong Kong. To-
day it certifies 39, including 31 on the main-
land (see chart on next page). Between
them, China’s home-grown business
schools—not counting branches of West-
ern ones it also hosts—offer more than 200
mba programmes. Competition for places
is fierce. Nearly 200,000 people appliedlast year, close to twice the number in 2016.
Fewer than one in four typically get in.
In many ways, the best Chinese busi-
ness schools look a lot like their Western ri-
vals. ceibs has aped foreign peers like in-
sead, which has branches in Singapore,
Abu Dhabi and, since last year, San Francis-
co, by creating satellite campuses—at
home, in Beijing and the southern boom-
town of Shenzhen, and abroad, in Ghana
and Switzerland. Many professors possess
Western experience. Chen Fangruo, dean
of Antai College of Economics and Manage-
ment at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University,
taught at Columbia Business School in
New York for 25 years before returning to
China. Their classroom manner is no dif-
ferent from their Western counterparts’:
sleeves rolled up, approachable, engaging,
witty. (When, in response to a question
about cost allocation in producing an mba
degree, a student suggests that staff sala-
ries are a considerable expense, a ceibs
professor quips that “we would rather be
treated as assets”.)Teaching to the test
Crucially, programmes have Western rig-
our—a must for those prized global accred-
itations, says Zhao Ying, who runs
Whichmba.net, a big Chinese tracker (not
to be confused with Which mba?, The Econ-
omist’s own annual ranking, which places
only one Chinese school, at Sun Yat-sen
University in Guangzhou, in the world’s
top 100; ceibsstopped submitting data forour list in 2016). “Our curriculum must
meet international standards,” says the
dean of one top institution.
Perhaps recognising this, the Commu-
nist party has allowed business schools to
grow unfettered. Although, as the same
dean adds, “we need to please the ministry
of education”, institutions like his have
been mostly spared from curbs on the use
of imported textbooks which the authori-
ties have imposed on other places of higher
learning. They are not expected to teach Xi
Jinping Thought, as the Chinese presi-
dent’s philosophy, enshrined in the coun-
try’s constitution three years ago, is offi-
cially known. The ministry does oversee
the Chinese management schools’ govern-
ing committee, which consists of 30 deans,
two or three officials and a few business ex-
ecutives. But meetings are sporadic and
contentious topics rare, according to an in-
sider. The last big directive came down in
2014, when Mr Xi forbade bureaucrats and
bosses of state-owned firms to attend
“high-priced training courses” as part of a
broad crackdown on graft. mbas had previ-
ously been all the rage among party cadres.
In important ways, however, China’s
management schools are growing more
distinct from those in the West. This is true
both in terms of what they teach and the ca-
reer boost they offer.
The teaching first. In the past, Chinese
students saw an mbaas a path to joining a
foreign company and launching an inter-
national career. No local firm was prepared
to pay the salary a good mba commanded.
Now China Inc has become “global, richer
and ready to recruit our students”, says
Ding Yuan, dean of ceibs. Roughly half of
full-time mbas from ceibs join Chinese
firms. Some go on to Chinese companies
that have either recently expanded abroad
or acquired a foreign business. Others are
young heirs taking charge of family firms
as the country’s first generation of entre-
preneurs retires. These have often gone to
university in the West and want to “re-
charge themselves” in China, in Mr Ding’s
words. The last big group are bosses who
missed out on a business degree in their
youth. ceibs has 700 of these enrolled at its
mbafor active executives, compared with
around 170 students for its regular mba
course—inverting the proportions typical
at Western schools. Applications for its
English-language Global Executive mba
are growing by 20% a year.
Courses cater to this Sinocentric stu-
dent body. At Antai some professors use
ancient Chinese texts (and not just Sun
Tzu’s “The Art of War”) to teach their own
brand of management theory. Marxism,
which many schools still include among
their foundation courses, is used as a way
to tell students how to navigate capitalism
with Chinese characteristics. Schoolsdo
not offer explicit modules on relationsSHANGHAI
Chinese management schools are thriving, thanks to a mixture of Western
and local traitsBusiness educationMBAs with Chinese characteristics
1