To meet the increasing demand for business insight into China in the West, the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business has opened an office in London, making it the first Chinese business school to open in the UK.
Based at St James’s Square, Westminster, the school says it will offer short-term courses to executives interested in working in Asia from September 2012, and is exploring the possibility of running MBA courses with a UK provider.
“We are reaching out globally to offer senior Western executives the unique insight generated by our China-based, world-class faculty into the economic and business issues in China and the rest of East Asia,” dean of the school, Xiang Bing, said at an opening ceremony last week.
“At the same time, we are forging partnerships with European business schools to help our Chinese students gain experience of Western management.”
Supported by the Hong Kong philanthropist Li Ka-shing, Cheung Kong is one of China’s leading business schools due to its executive level MBA courses, successful alumni and international faculty, which includes former Wharton, Stanford and Yale academics.
Like many Chinese business schools it has seen growing interest from international students as the country’s economy blossoms, and the opening of branches in London and New York earlier this year seeks to capitalise on this.
“Our programmes will offer critical insights for international business leaders, helping them to understand how to compete and collaborate with Chinese firms going global,” said Cheung Kong’s Chief Representative for Europe, Oliver Shiell. “Participants will learn how to leverage China growth opportunities and gain new perspectives on China’s fast-changing business landscape.”
“Management education globally has been heavily dependent on Western theory and research, but theory hasn’t really been exported from East to West,” he added. “I think we’re going to see a rebalancing of information flows. With its extraordinary entrepreneurial environment, it’s highly likely that the next management trends are going to come from China.”
In 2010, a Bloomberg report claimed that more than 20,000 students of all nationalities enrolled in business schools in China – a rise from just 90 in 1991. Meanwhile the student populations of the best schools were said to be as much as 40 per cent international.
