Wang Jianhua, the president of Shandong Gold Mining, is part of a new generation of middle-age Chinese executives going back to school. Once a month, he travels four hours by train from Shandong Province to Beijing to attend executive M.B.A. classes.
“After the Cultural Revolution, a lot of people felt the need to make up for lost time, so we worked extremely hard,” said Mr. Wang, 56, who studies at the China Europe International Business School, or Ceibs.
Mr. Wang was sent to a poor mountainous region during the Cultural Revolution, at a time when higher education was viewed with suspicion and those who were considered privileged were “sent down” to work with peasants. He ended up as the general manager of a chemical company, before making his fortune in a series of other ventures.
“I’ve been very successful,” he said. “However, I used to believe that because I was successful I must be right, but I’ve learned that what is successful in the past might be a burden for me in the future.”
Chinese executives are going back to school partly because, unlike their Western counterparts, many did not have the chance to study properly earlier in life.
“The average age of our executive M.B.A. student is 41 or 42, with almost 20 years of work experience — they are much older than their counterparts in Europe or the U.S.,” said Qian Yingyi, the dean of the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University in Beijing. They “simply didn’t have a chance to study business in their 20s.”
Some never finished high school. They grew up during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and then built their careers through the state-owned enterprise system in the 1980s and ’90s.
Deans of business schools say that Chinese executives are often looking for more than just another qualification or practical managerial advice.
“China’s economy has really been booming in the last 20 years,” said Charles Chen, the associate dean at Ceibs. “There is now a tremendous need to summarize past experiences in order to move forward. To understand how, as well as why.”
“Chinese executives are great with intuition and experience, but what is missing is broader perspectives,” said Mr. Qian of Tsinghua University.
Long told that “to get rich is glorious” — a quote often attributed to the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping — some entrepreneurs are questioning the greater meaning of their success.
“Business schools in China are having some responsibility toward solving social problems in country,” said Xiang Bing, the founding dean at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, which the Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing established in Beijing in 2002 as the first private business school in mainland China.
“We have to look at the whole equation of wealth — why you do business, how you do business, and what to do with the money you have,” Mr. Xiang said.
The executive M.B.A. curriculum at Cheung Kong includes classes on philosophy, Eastern and Western religion, global history and literature.
“We hope our executive students can strive for enlightened lives — it may not be attainable, but it should be strived for,” Mr. Xiang said.
Leading Chinese executives or their companies pay upwards of 600,000 renminbi, or about $96,000, for a part-time, two- to three-year course. Many fly across the country to attend four-day blocks of classes once a month.
In a light, spacious lounge at the Ceibs campus in Beijing, Wei Qiuli, a senior vice president at Gome Electrical Appliances, explained why so many Chinese entrepreneurs like her were enrolling in these programs.
“The environment here instills a sense of calm so we can systematically think about what we’ve been going through in our jobs,” Ms. Wei, 46, said.
Nearby, dozens of high-level Chinese business leaders — her fellow students — were tapping out messages on their iPhones and preparing for their class on Disruptive Marketing.
Ceibs, which has campuses in Beijing and Shanghai, plus a smaller presence in Shenzhen, has about 770 executive M.B.A. students.
After three decades of the kind of rapid economic growth that does not allow much time for contemplation, business leaders in China are turning to executive M.B.A.’s for a greater understanding of the global business world, how to be better corporate leaders and, increasingly, what to do after they have succeeded.
Twenty years ago, management education in China barely existed. While the first M.B.A. in the world was offered by Harvard University in 1908, it was not until 1991 that China introduced its own M.B.A. programs at a handful of schools. It took several more years for the first executive M.B.A. programs to open.
Today, China has 62 business schools offering executive M.B.A.’s to more than 8,000 students a year.
“At present, China’s executive M.B.A. education can hardly meet the huge demands of senior management talents due to China’s fast economic growth,” said Lu Xiongwen, the dean of the School of Management at Fudan University in Shanghai.
Four of the top 10 executive M.B.A. programs listed in the 2012 Financial Times ranking are taught in greater China, though most of them are partnerships with Western institutions. In first place is a collaboration between the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Ceibs, established under an agreement with the European Commission, is in the top 10. There is also a linkup between Insead in France and Tsinghua, and another between the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Fudan.
“Last year, 68 percent of our executive M.B.A. students were from the top levels of corporations — president, general managers, chairman of the boards,” said Mr. Chen of Ceibs, adding that almost half came from private Chinese companies, with the rest divided between state-owned enterprises and joint ventures.
Schools are not predicting a slowdown in the growth of M.B.A. programs in the near future. “The economy of mainland China is very likely to catch up with that of the U.S. in 10 years,” Mr. Lu of Fudan University said. “China has 50,000 M.B.A. and executive M.B.A. graduates each year, which is far from enough to support China’s economic growth and companies’ demands in order to survive against global competition.”
“The demand for business education is so huge in China right now,” said Mr. Xiang of Cheung Kong. “And if we need, we can eventually just start opening up our executive programs to more vice presidents, division heads and less senior management.”
Kit Gillet is a freelance journalist currently based in Beijing. His work appears regularly in the international press, for publications including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Foreign Policy and CNN.
© 2013 The International Herald Tribune
