When the China Europe International Business School (ceibs) was established in Shanghai’s Pudong district in 1994, its campus abutted mostly nondescript warehouses and tracts of marshy farmland. Today the area is among the city’s ritziest—and gives it its iconic skyline. 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 government. 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 newspaper. Only heavyweights such as Harvard Business School, Wharton, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and insead of France scored better.To get more news about
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Business education in China is booming, 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 institutions are among the 90 or so worldwide to boast the coveted “triple crown” of accreditations—from bodies in America, Belgium and Britain. In 2012 the American one, aacsb International, accredited 13 Chinese schools, seven of them in Hong Kong. Today it certifies 39, including 31 on the mainland (see chart). Between them, China’s home-grown business schools—not counting branches of Western ones it also hosts—offer more than 200 mba programmes. Competition for places is fierce. Nearly 200,000 people applied last year, close to twice the number in 2016. Fewer than one in four typically get in.
In many ways, the best Chinese business schools look a lot like their Western rivals. ceibs has aped foreign peers like insead, which has branches in Singapore, Abu Dhabi and, since last year, San Francisco, by creating satellite campuses—at home, in Beijing and the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, and abroad, in Ghana and Switzerland. Many professors possess Western experience. Chen Fangruo, dean of Antai College of Economics and Management 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 different 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 salaries are a considerable expense, a ceibs professor quips that “we would rather be treated as assets”.)
Crucially, programmes have Western rigour—a must for those prized global accreditations, says Zhao Ying, who runs Whichmba.net, a big Chinese tracker (not to be confused with Which mba?, The Economist’s own annual ranking, which places only one Chinese school, at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, in the world’s top 100; ceibs stopped submitting data for our list in 2016). “Our curriculum must meet international standards,” says the dean of one top institution.
Perhaps recognising this, the Communist 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 authorities have imposed on other places of higher learning. They are not expected to teach Xi Jinping Thought, as the Chinese president’s philosophy, enshrined in the country’s constitution three years ago, is officially known. The ministry does oversee the Chinese management schools’ governing committee, which consists of 30 deans, two or three officials and a few business executives. But meetings are sporadic and contentious topics rare, according to an insider. 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 previously been all the rage among party cadres.