China's B-School Boom

Walk into any classroom at one of China's elite business schools and what you're likely to see isn't all that different from what you would find at Harvard, Wharton, or MIT's Sloan School. True, there's a preponderance of Asian faces and the occasional smattering of Mandarin. But the classes, course materials, subject matter, and even the teachers are virtually identical to their U.S. counterparts.

Indeed, in most cases the MBA programs attended by China's top students are very much the product of Western educational institutions, which in recent years have rushed to establish programs on the mainland. The idea: to tap into the enormous demand for talent created by China's white-hot economy.

The colossal effort by the central government of China to educate the nation's next generation of managers is unprecedented, and it has been undertaken at a speed that is nothing short of breathtaking. In just 15 years, Chinese B-schools raced through the evolution it took U.S. B-schools more than half a century to accomplish -- not by reinventing the wheel but by adopting the U.S. model wholesale. "China is borrowing what it can and creating what it needs," says Patrick Moreton, co-director of the executive MBA program offered by Fudan University and Washington University in St. Louis' Olin School of Business.

The need couldn't be more urgent. Twenty-five years into China's transformation into a market economy, the nation faces a critical shortage of well-trained managers. After two decades of explosive economic growth, many Chinese managers run regional or national companies, yet they lack the sophisticated skills they need to compete effectively.

•	China's B-School Boom Meet the new managerial class in the making BusinessWeek, Sunday, Jan. 8, 2006 Byline: Louis Lavelle, with Susann Rutledge in New York