China, whose Great Wall has stood for centuries as a symbol of isolationism, is trying to reposition itself as a global player. Chinese leaders say their goal is to create a socialist market economy built by a new generation of Western-style MBAs and CPAs.

Lu Fuyuan, vice minister of China's Ministry of Education, speaking at the Global Forum last June in Chicago, said experts in his country forecast a need for as many as 1.4 million MBAs in the next decade. They are looking to the U.S., Europe and Canada to help meet that daunting demand.

In 1998, the chasm between ambitious aim and practical reality remained enormous. As of last summer, Lu reported, there were only 2,000 MBAs in China, with fewer than 30,000 MBA students enrolled in 56 MBA-granting universities. By comparison, U.S. schools have about 300,000 full- and part-time MBA students, turning out about 100,000 MBAs each year.

Although many educators say the million-plus target is unfeasible, several management schools and multinationals are engaged in programs, partnerships and exchanges to enhance China's quest, and advance their own missions and marketing strategies at the same time.

Through the decades when top universities in developed countries were turning out class after class of ever more sophisticated managers, China showed little interest in such training for its people. Business education in China began early, in 1929, at one of its premier schools, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. But when Communist China chose to follow the Soviet model of education in the early 1950s, management education was eliminated from most universities and submerged into the offerings of a few universities of finance and economics, said Buck Pei, a Taiwan-born professor of accounting at Arizona State University.

Whatever management training existed was for industrial engineers and central planners. The concepts of product marketing and people management were foreign notions.

"Back in '83 and '84, we had a hard time explaining to Chinese managers what human resource management meant," said Joe Alutto, business dean at The Ohio State University and former dean at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, one of the first U.S. schools to have a presence in China. "The party ran the people functions and managers were only concerned with production issues. We spent a lot of time just broadening their concept of what it meant to manage."

Before 1985, Chinese university graduates had guaranteed jobs, but they were assigned according to a government plan, not the needs of companies or the wishes of individuals, said Cascade Huan, a native of China and AACSB's director of global accreditation. "It was not uncommon to see someone major in electronics or engineering and end up being a travel guide."

After the opening of diplomatic relations between China and the West, an initial push for management education was promoted by the Canadian government. The Canada International Development Agency (CIDA) invested $40 million over 13 years to fund 24 Canadian universities' deployment of business faculty and other resources to help China establish 24 of its own business schools. Eleven of those schools now are licensed by the Ministry of Education to award MBA degrees, said Sylvain St-Amand, executive director for international studies at McGill University. The most intense effort for management training didn't occur, however, until 1992, when China decided to create a socialist market economy.

The would-be shapers of this new economy now lack training in the disciplines of the international marketplace. Lu told educators in Chicago of the need for creativity and entrepreneurship; for CPAs who can create modern financial systems, based on professional knowledge and high ethical standards; for managers with an overall grasp of management and decision-making; and for Ph.D. students who will become the future faculty of management schools.

Thus, simultaneously, if not always to the same degree, China's government entities, state-owned enterprises, private businesses and universities all are seeking admission to what is for them a new world-the world of modern business.

To reach market economy status, China will need a huge quantity and a high level of skill in its managerial force. "Those people simply are not present now," said Bill Buzzi, assistant dean for global programs at Duquesne University's business school. "Even the successful up and running MBA programs" in China are turning out only 30 or 40 MBAs a year."

China's centralized government is at the source of the demand for Western management education, just as it is at the source of plans for social and economic growth, and a more open market.

"The State Council, two years ago, quite clearly gave directives to all the ministers that they need to be very seriously looking at training their people on modern management skills," said Japhet Law, MBA director at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. "When a directive like that comes from the State Council, it makes a whole lot of difference."

Western educators who have worked with Chinese officials say that they recognize that keeping the basic services of the country running smoothly requires more expertise than their bureaucrats currently have.

"The Chinese government refers to the fact that it needs literally hundreds of thousands of MBA-qualified managers in coming years if they are going to complete a genuine transformation in their business and industry," said Earl Gibbons, associate vice president of overseas programs at Thunderbird, The American Graduate School of International Management.

The University of Southern California has offered short-term management development training programs, at the Party School of the Central Committee, said Richard Drobnick, vice provost for international affairs and director of the Marshall School Center for International Business at USC. "This is where all the higher cadres go to school," he said. "They are groping with how to get some management training into what in the past has just been a school for ideology." Eight of USC's finance professors were hired to familiarize these high-level ministers with such concepts as macroeconomics, accounting, finance, present value and hedging.

Part of the movement toward a socialist market economy involves privatizing state-owned enterprises. To bring these enterprises up to par with global companies, the managers will need a comparable level of skill.

"The Chinese are keenly aware, keenly focused, on state-owned enterprise problems," said Bradley Farnsworth, director of the Center for International Business Education and Research at The University of Michigan. "These are old dinosaurs, government-owned businesses that are incredibly ineffective."

If the Chinese government is the first driver of demand, it certainly is not the only one. Once China opted to begin the reforms needed to persuade more investment and trade after the events at Tiananmen Square in 1989, its doors were open to world influences. The drive to privatize internal enterprises stimulated interest among the people in learning how to succeed.

"A lot of the demand for business education comes from the Chinese businesses themselves," said CUHK's Law. "They see the need for people who are well-versed in modern business to run their operations. They start competing for those who have an MBA and bid up the offers."

Multinational companies also are a major driver of the demand for Western management education, Newsline interviewees said. Corporations eager to develop markets in the sprawling, populous country of 1.2 billion have a huge financial interest in the prowess of China's managerial class. Having to accommodate expatriate managers in China in the manner to which they are accustomed at home is a costly endeavor.

"The typical package for an American working in China is $400,000 a year," said Farnsworth. That includes a salary, a premium to convince them to work in China, a housing allowance, education allowance, car and driver, and home leave expenses.

Managers recruited from nearby Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong have the advantage of speaking Chinese, but because they are in high demand, their price tag is reportedly about the same as managers from the West.

"China certainly would prefer that multinational companies hire Chinese employees, rather than bringing in a whole bunch of other employees who don't do a lot for their economy, or their development," said Brenda Sumberg, director of education systems alliances at Motorola University.

The key to more efficient operations, from the perspective of both the multinationals and China itself, will be to replace expatriate managers with natives. But multinationals don't have the local talent base they have else-where in the world, said Thunderbird's Gibbons. "They have been forced to use more expatriates than they would like, and they have to inaugurate training programs of their own within the company to attempt to at least bring some business literacy to a larger group of the workforce."

Companies that plan major investments in China train not only their own workers but also employees of joint venture partners, upstream and downstream customers and suppliers to try to upgrade skills within the entire network of their business relationships.

Motorola University in China is launching various educational partnership efforts with other companies, and American and Chinese universities, Sumberg said, because it could not find people to work at Motorola University who had the necessary skills. "We were concerned that if we developed people we hired, they could be pulled away from us by other multinational companies. So we really want to create a pool of people to draw from," she said.

Collaborations among governments, companies and schools are a natural outcome as China and the West see the massiveness of the demand. Chinese universities are eager to partner with multinationals and Western universities to modernize their curriculum and upgrade their own status by association. Companies that can't find a native talent pool in the workforce or in the Chinese schools, ask for a Western university to come in. And, a number of b-schools, attracted by the international potential, the huge market and the opportunity to serve existing or potential corporate customers, form alliances with either Chinese schools, government entities or multinationals.

There is a certain irony that in a country of a billion-plus people, the resource most needed to build its market economy is people. Yet, that is the case.

"In my meetings with one of the vice ministers of the State Economics and Trade Commission, he said their biggest problem without any question was people," said George Benson, dean at the University of Georgia's b-school and former business dean at Rutgers. "They have not grown up in a capitalist economy, they do not understand the basic principles. In transforming state-owned enterprises into economic engines of the state, their problem is training and education."

Even if Chinese schools are offering the "low cost, mass market version" of management education, they are limited in what they are able to do, Thunderbird's Gibbons said. Chinese MBA programs have increased three-fold in about the last two years, yet classes are only about 100 to 300 people in each university.

The enormous need for more people in management education has not yet compelled Chinese leaders to expand their homegrown MBA program. Quotas for the number of students in business at Chinese universities still are in force.

In part at least, the quotas are necessitated, several educators believe, by dint of many other demands. "Rhetorically, support for business education is there," said Duquesne's Buzzi, "but how much they are able to do with their limited resources is another matter. Having seen some of the other problems they have to deal with in terms of displaced workers, the environment, the flooding, management education can't be the kind of high priority they might want it to be. It just simply can't."

State-owned companies also have a problem dedicating resources to education, said Gibbons. "The same enterprises that have a tremendous dearth of qualified talent also are strapped financially. There is no immediate solution."

An infrastructure is being built, but it is "woefully behind the times," said Thomas Gutteridge, business dean at the University of Connecticut. For example, faculty at top schools earn about $300 a year. Salaries are not at all competitive with what trained managers can make. There is little incentive for an educated manager to choose teaching for a career, especially if he or she has had Western training and experience.

"Deans of business schools in China are afraid of losing their faculty members because the minute they become good, they could go out and earn a lot more as consultants to businesses in China," said Motorola's Sumberg.

Gibbons agrees that faculty limitations are one of the greatest weaknesses to overcome because there are relatively few with the proper background. "We always have hosted Chinese scholars, and we continue to do that," he said. "At some level this upgrades the capability in those schools when they return home. But it is slow, and it is complicated by the fact that the best qualified people in the university also have some of the best opportunities in the private sector."

Many business faculty previously taught industrial management. If the faculty member has only been educated in the Chinese environment, elements of the old ideology linger and permeate the business curriculum. These faculty do not have much to offer students by way of international market exposure or experience.

The Chinese teaching style is lecturing. Students ask questions, not to expand learning or challenge the professor's thinking, but to get the information right, said Eugene Muscat, associate dean of external affairs at the University of San Francisco. "My observation is that Chinese universities are doing a good job in knowledge, but not in skill sets. That's what they really have to look to us for. It's cultural. They have to go outside of themselves."

But how does that faculty learn new skill sets? Alutto wonders if Western schools can justify using their own faculty to train faculty in China. "You can justify training Chinese faculty in the U.S. and sending them back. But it is difficult to see how to make it economically viable to be sending your faculty overseas, particularly if at the same time you have high standards for research," he said.

Physical resources often are lacking, or below par. Western deans, negotiating arrangements for faculty who teach for short periods of time in China, say they have to be adamant in their negotiations for something as commonplace in the West as adequate housing. Their Chinese counterparts expected that American faculty could be billeted in the way of native faculty, with offices that double as sleeping quarters.

McGill's St-Amand recalled that when the CIDA project began, the Chinese university was supposed to contribute an apartment for the visiting professor. "The reality was that they had very few resources and the conditions were pretty tough," he said. These things now have changed, especially in the larger cities. "But it always depends on what the deal is. We certainly are very careful to ensure a level of comfort," said St-Amand. "People are willing to go to China once for the kick of their lives. But they become really useful the second time; and it's harder to convince them to go unless you provide them with good conditions."

Thunderbird's Gibbons sees the university infrastructure as a mixed bag. The best universities often have substantial resources. They have new buildings, equipped classrooms, more access to computers and the Internet, but it is not uniform. "The ones in major cities, like Peking University, obviously are showpieces and get a disproportionate share," he said. "Away from the power centers in business and government, things fall off a bit, but those schools also are attempting to do the best they can with whatever they do have access to."

Libraries, computer labs, and other requirements of accredited schools, have to be negotiated clearly. When USF was negotiating with its Chinese partner, China Resources (Holdings) Co., Ltd. (CRC), to set up an experimental MBA, in 1990, Muscat said he had to demand that the holding company build a Western-style library with books, microfiche readers, Internet access and computers. It was very difficult, he said, because the state-owned company was not in a big hurry to make that investment of its own capital.

"The tension in educational circles in China," Ohio State's Alutto said, "is between serving large numbers of people with some basic concepts and basic ideas so they can move forward, and at the same time recognizing that they really do need some very sophisticated skills that are expensive to invest in."

As obvious needs vie with acute limitations, Huan said, China has no other choice but to invite foreign degree providers to help expedite and improve its training quality to meet market demands. "This is a major breakthrough in Chinese higher education history," she said. "This is the first time since 1949, the founding of the People's Republic of China, that the government actually allowed somebody from outside to help lead the direction of business education."

But government still controls who is issuing degrees. "Universities have leeway in bringing in non-degree programs to train people," said CUHK's Law, "but the degree programs always are under the control of the Ministry of Education, this is where the quota system applies."

Institutions, government agencies and companies in Europe, Canada and the U.S. have experimented, negotiated and implemented a variety of ways-altruistic and self-interested-to provide management education to Chinese executives and students. The types of arrangements mostly fall into alliances between Western and Chinese universities; Western universities and Chinese enterprises; government agencies and universities, multinationals and universities; and universities and Chinese faculty.

A common denominator in almost all of the alliances is that some type of funding from the West is at the root of the agreements. "China is not interested in having money go out of China to the U.S.," Muscat said.

For the Chinese universities' part, alliances with Western schools are beneficial in just about every way. Faculty training, academic status, funding, increased degree value, recruiting leverage and opportunities for travel outside of China are all potentially at the end of the partnership rainbow.

The motivators for Western schools in China primarily center on opportunities to expose students to global markets, internationalize faculty, give them new research avenues, generate business contacts and create networks for future activities, Newsline interviewees said.

But Western universities, while drawn to the possibilities of working in China, have to deal with the substantial difference between the $100 to $200 yearly tuition paid by Chinese students and the U.S. tuition of $300 to $600 per credit. Western schools, no matter how wealthy by comparison, don't have the capacity to sign a blank check. They are looking for ways to structure programs that are sustainable over the long run. Usually university-to-university alliances have to be supported at least in part by private philanthropy or corporate support.

One such university partnership is between Duquesne University and Northern Jiao Tong University in Beijing, a telecommunications school. After the Beijing school approached Duquesne four years ago, the two began a limited exchange of faculty.

Only after gaining philanthropic support from a former officer of a major bank was Duquesne able to expand its offerings, said business dean Thomas Murrin. The U.S. school now has established a two-year program marketed to American students in which one year is spent on the Pittsburgh campus and the other in Beijing. Duquesne also is putting its 12 MBA core courses on line for Internet transmission to Northern Jiao Tong. A third offering will be executive education programs for middle managers; a fourth will be a weekend/evening MBA program, also for middle managers.

"We have received a commitment from Northern Jiao Tong, through the Ministry of Railways, to build a new business school, including a two-story distance education annex. We are going to help them raise funds from multinationals to complete that," Murrin said.

For some, school-to-school opportunities are pursued enthusiastically, even when substantial revenue costs are involved, while other institutions take a more pragmatic approach.

USC has a variety of activities for faculty and students to fulfill on the school's strategic plan to provide teaching and research opportunities in Asia and Latin America. "We think it's important because our customers, our students and corporate supporters and government agencies all need to become globally oriented," said Drobnick. Short lecture programs, 10-day student visits and short-term training and faculty collaboration is the route USC is taking.

"I'm absolutely not in favor of setting up a degree program over there," said Drobnick. "Our faculty wouldn't go. Maybe we would get some to go for a few weeks, and then in the end you would have to use people who aren't your faculty members. You'd have very little control over it and all of a sudden you're in the process of franchising your name. I can't imagine any of the major schools wanting to do this."

Farnsworth at Michigan agrees. "I would be very surprised if that happens here in the near term," he said. "What we see is a real opportunity to attract students from there into a regular MBA program." He thinks that multinational companies committed to localization in China could identify talented local managers and send them to the U.S. for their education, on the condition that they stay with the company for at least five years. If they do not, they would have to repay their tuition and expenses.

Fordham University and 25 other Jesuit colleges and universities, however, are willing to export their MBA. In November 1998, the Jesuit consortium is launching a full-time MBA program at Peking University in Beijing. It will be taught by one faculty member from each of the consortium schools, thus lessening the burden on any one school, said Ernest Scalberg, business dean at Fordham.

Jesuit educators have a long history in China and are trusted there, Scalberg said. International education is definitely part of the mission of the schools and Scalberg sees this MBA program as fulfilling the mission. "I haven't seen faculty applications yet for teaching assignments in China, but my guess is that across the 26 schools we can probably staff the whole program with faculty who speak Mandarin."

Fordham is serving as the lead school and will place its name on the MBA degrees awarded. This will be the first MBA granted by a Western school that has full Chinese approval. It required the consortium to team with one of the 56 approved MBA-granting schools in China. Other requirements were equal stature between the partners, with one-half of the curriculum provided by Peking University faculty; joint management of the program; appropriate curriculum for Chinese business needs; and no religious content.

Scalberg said the Jesuit consortium is funding the program to start, but the $10-12,000 tuition is expected to allow the consortium to break even in two or three years. The schools are not allowed to make a profit on the program.

Putting the school name on an EMBA degree is another route. Rutgers' b-school is one of several that have partnered with Chinese universities, in this case Dalian University of Technology, to provide management education to mid-career managers. In the original program, DUT conferred a degree, while Rutgers awarded a certificate for an EMBA program offered to middle managers at SINOPEC's (the China petrochemical corporation) Petrochemical College in Beijing.

Last summer, still in partnership with DUT, Rutgers began awarding its own EMBA degrees to students completing an open EMBA program offered at Motorola University in downtown Beijing, said Benson, the former Rutgers dean.

"This is a Rutgers degree that follows its standards for GMAT scores and everything," Benson said. He disagreed with Drobnick about not being able to control academic quality at a distance. "You control the quality of admissions so you are getting people who are qualified for the program. You've got your best faculty doing the teaching. And if you don't have somebody on the ground from your own staff, you can hire one or more people to provide those services," he said.

The University of San Francisco chose to create an alliance with a Chinese enterprise and thus is able to offer an American MBA to Chinese students without major Western funding. CRC, with about 15,000 employees, asked USF to design an MBA program for its employees in 1989. The effort is funded by retained earnings that the company dedicated to education, Muscat said.

USF created a distance education program that is delivered in Hong Kong to some of the 5,000 employees stationed there. The program is termed tutored video instruction, with videotapes from the American classroom sent to the class of 30 in Hong Kong. A USF-trained facilitator is on-site to run the video and coordinate the fielding of questions for the U.S. professors. Every 10 weeks two faculty members spend time with the Chinese students.

"We decided on video instruction for economy," Muscat said. "The holding company ruled out flying 30 managers to the United States, and they ruled out us flying faculty there and having them stay there."

Although distance education does not seem to have taken hold widely with other schools that have programs in China, Muscat sings its praises. Chinese men and women are able to see men and women in the West-Europeans, Chinese Americans, U.S. citizens-and the way they function in the West, he said. "In this program, a three-camera production, they see students interacting with instructors and challenging them, something unheard of in their culture. They can see students interacting with each other and actually creating knowledge."

Apart from the content of courses, Muscat said, these Chinese students are seeing the interactions among whites, blacks, Hispanics and women. "Those are intangibles, but if U.S. companies understood how important those cultural nuances are when they send somebody to Japan or China, we would be doing a lot better," he said.

So far, close to 100 students have earned their MBA degree in this USF program, including two groups of 15 students from another Chinese company, Guangdong Enterprises, who are taught in both Hong Kong and Beijing.

"We very much wanted to do this program," Muscat said. "In 1989, of a faculty of 45, five had lived or taught overseas. Our objective was to improve that. In 1998, we have 28 of 49 faculty who have had a significant experience in Asia. That was absolutely our goal."

The University of Michigan also participates in training students at Chinese enterprises, through an institute in its b-school, Farnsworth said. Faculty from the business school go to China for a couple of weeks at a time, and managers also are brought to Michigan for training. "They enter into long-term partnerships with individual enterprises and do research projects to improve the quality of management," he said.

McGill, under the aegis of CIDA, now is developing a "University- Industry Partnership Program" that involves industries in China and Canada working with universities in both countries to develop executive training programs that are customized for the three Chinese sectors of telecommunications, financial services and energy.

Another McGill program in Shanghai is a joint venture that will train financial services managers. The goal is to have it be self-sustaining, paid for by the users. "This is very, very customized, and it's for mature students," St-Amand said. "It's not an MBA or an EMBA, but it will be a diploma. We're working with local partners to have it recognized at least over there, and we would put our McGill label of quality on it, as well."

One of the major corporate educators in China is Motorola University, which recently established a partnership with Arizona State and Tsinghua University in Beijing to deliver a high technology MBA solely to Motorola employees in China, beginning in November. It is a duplicate of the new high technology MBA degree being offered by ASU in Tempe and has the same entrance requirements as ASU's requirements for an international student, including the TOEFL and the GMAT.

"This program has the express purpose of creating the capacity among local, high potential employees to move into senior management positions," Sumberg said. "Our senior managers are primarily expatriates, from the U.S., Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. That's a very expensive process. We want to create the capability of having local senior managers, and that capability hasn't existed for the last several decades."

Motorola envisions a knowledge transfer through three iterations of the high tech MBA program. In the first, all courses will be taught by about 15 ASU faculty, receiving cultural and environmental input from Tsinghua faculty. If that succeeds, then a second iteration would have ASU faculty members present, but paired with a Tsinghua professor who might co-teach. The third stage would be the Tsinghua faculty member teaching and the ASU professor serving as a coach.

"After three iterations of the program," said ASU's Pei, "we are confident Tsinghua faculty can take over. This is another way of getting our faculty globalized, when you work with the faculty of another culture you learn a lot. Likewise, you learn from students who can provide our faculty with feedback as to how they see the Chinese market operating and what it takes for high-tech manufacturers such as Motorola to be successful in that market. Our focus is on globalizing our faculty so that when they come back they can diffuse those experiences to their colleagues, to students and through the curriculum."

The Chinese "wanted an American degree taught by American faculty members because they want the Chinese employees to get used to the Western style of thinking and communicating and interacting," Sumberg said.

ASU's Pei said his school chose to work with Motorola in this effort because it wants to focus on corporations and not have to recruit students from the public at large.

A second Motorola program involves Peking University, in Beijing and Nankai University, in Tianjin. "We are working with them to incorporate a human resource development specialization in their MBA programs," Sumberg said. A faculty member from Penn State will deliver the courses so as to transfer HR technology to faculty of both universities.

"The purpose is to really create training and development professionals in China," Sumberg said. "There is no such thing in China today, so it is an opportunity for those people who are in training and development positions to enhance their skills and knowledge in that arena, in instructional systems design and human resource development in general."

The program will be open in March 1999 to any students in the MBA programs of those schools. "We started creating the desire to do this by running those courses for the last year and a half as a certificate program in Motorola University and inviting other multinational companies, such as Ford and Hewlett-Packard, as well as faculty members from those schools, to participate. We're just looking to create a capacity," said Sumberg.

Two Canadian companies, Royal Bank of Canada and Great West Life, are participating along with CIDA in funding a development project in Beijing, with the Graduate School of the People's Bank of China. "We also are in discussion with multinationals who see our project in Shanghai as a breakthrough involving financial services," St-Amand said. "For them it would be extremely useful and they are keen to support it, but we have no names yet."

Another way that a multinational is helping to foster Chinese management is by training Chinese faculty at a U.S. university. Carrier Air Conditioning has been sending faculty from China's Finance and Economics School to the University of Connecticut's Ph.D. accounting program for the past three years.

"Carrier needs lots of accounting professionals in China. The Chinese faculty work here with our faculty and Ph.D. students for the better part of a year as a visiting faculty member," Gutteridge said.

While the faculty training program works smoothly, the Connecticut dean said a previous alliance with Aetna Insurance/ Health Company in Hartford, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University broke down within a couple of years. After Aetna promised to build a $10 million business school at Jiao Tong and began using UConn's faculty to help develop the mission, strategy, faculty and curriculum, the company decided to give Jiao Tong control of expenditures. "Jiao Tong decided they could get greater bang for the buck by trying to spread the money as evenly as possible across a large number of individuals and pay American partners as little as possible. We said, 'That doesn't work for us,'" said Gutteridge.

To have faculty willing to get involved, Gutteridge said, there have to be incentives and resources to support them. When Aetna gave away its control of spending to Jaio Tong, the university was not willing to use the money to pay what the U.S. faculty thought was fair.

The oldest management education effort between the West and China is the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), started 20 years ago and co-funded by the European Union (formerly the Common Market) and Shanghai municipal governments. This was the first partnership that included a Chinese governmental unit.

The educational partners are Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the European Foundation for Management Development (efmd). The school offers a full-time,18-month MBA program and a part-time executive MBA, along with non-degree short management courses for working executives. The CEIBS MBA costs $6,000 and is offered in English. It is coordinated with faculty from the University of Virginia's Darden School and UCLA and provides most of its internships within European companies. The $15,000 CEIBS EMBA extends over 24-months and is offered in English or Mandarin.

Even though CEIBS is an agency/university/ government type of alliance, the cost actually is borne for the most part by Western companies. "The folks attending are sponsored by international companies that can afford to pay the freight, rather than by China itself," Gutteridge said.

The other long- running educational partnership involving a government agency is CIDA. Started in 1982, it was borne of an idealism that had no designs on expanding Canada's trade with China. "Only a developmental agenda was on the table," said St-Amand. "That could be qualified as naive, but, nevertheless, the Canadian government was doing it to support the reform. They thought that by supporting the development of management education, it would lead to the development of a market economy."

McGill, one of the 24 Canadian universities that signed on to the CIDA concept, was motivated by its own mission to become the most international institution in North America, St-Amand said. "If you cannot include a fifth of humankind, you are not really international. There was a huge interest in our faculty to be involved and to get to know what was going on and contribute to it."

Many Chinese faculty members originally benefited from Canada's link with Chinese universities by going to Canadian business schools to earn a degree. The goal was to have them earn Ph.D.s and return to China to teach, St-Amand said, but many more of them took the opportunity to stay in Canada. "At a certain point, both the Chinese and we decided that it defeats the purpose if people we train stay here, so we moved the emphasis to training people in China."

In the last five years, most faculty training is occurring in China, with short visits of three to five months in Canada. "They get exposure, but it is not as complete as taking a whole MBA or Ph.D. program here," said St-Amand.

McGill has been successful in recruiting some of its former Chinese students who studied in Canada and got their degrees to return to teach in China for a semester. "They now are teaching in American or Canadian schools and maybe feel guilty, but they also really want to contribute. They have no problem going back to China and they are so good because they speak the language. They are perfect to bridge the gap," St-Amand said.

The Chinese government is liberal in allowing Chinese faculty members to visit Western universities, CUHK's Law said. About 10 to 20 percent of a school's faculty is usually away in Europe or the United States for training. But it is expensive to send faculty to the U.S. to live for a year or even a few months, he said, unless outside foundations are funding it.

CUHK, in 1979, started training about 30 or 40` faculty members from mainland China each year in business administration, Law said. At first, mechanical engineering professors would be given the order to teach finance. "Now they are quite knowledgeable," Law said. "I wouldn't say they are sophisticated yet. By international standards, they are not there yet, but they are getting there."

The glow has worn off for some schools that have experience in China. The commitment to fulfilling international missions and strategic objectives is still there, but the excitement of being wined and dined in Shanghai or Peking has given way to the realpolitik of tough negotiations.

The Chinese government still keeps strict regulations in force for educational programs, inhibiting initiatives that could modernize China's management education. Quotas on numbers of students, tuition ceilings for MBA programs, the requirements that programs be non-profit and led by local institutions, all have a decelerating effect on an already slow process.

"The Chinese invented bureaucracy about 6,000 years ago and they do it very well," said Duquesne's Buzzi. "There are lots of hoops to jump through to do almost anything, and many, many different layers of bureaucracy and different ministries that have to be consulted because there are so many overlapping responsibilities in their government. It is starting to change, but, nevertheless, it is sometimes daunting and you have to be patient."

Sustaining a long-term infusion from the West will be a key issue, said CUHK's Law. "The first time people are in Shanghai it is exciting and interesting, but if they have to go every year, they may say, 'I really don't want to.' The typical U.S. faculty may be lucky to have 5 percent who are interested in China or Asian studies. They will run out of people very soon. That's really the issue for U.S. and European concerns to address before they can have a really sustainable program in China," Law said.

For Western schools to continue to participate fruitfully over the long-haul, Alutto said, the exchange has to go both ways. If the U.S. institution puts a lot of money into helping build the Chinese institution but it's never clear what is coming back to the American institution in terms of enhancing faculty capability or students' ability, that won't work. "In a number of prior efforts in China," he said, "that's exactly what the structure has been. The American institution is a philanthropist and as soon as it realizes the cost of that, everything falls apart."

Putting resources into a project in China can be "an endless sinking hole," said Buzzi. "Any university administration is reticent to get involved without guarantees that there is going to be some help, or some stopgap measures along with it."

Farnsworth agrees. "The Chinese government always is looking for relatively inexpensive ways to get the expertise and training. A lot of us are very wary, that there might be hidden costs. So it is a combination of being cautious and also recognizing that management education is booming everywhere else. China has long-term prospects but in the near term there are people who can pay our current rates now," he said.

Financial resources are always an issue, Alutto said. The Chinese are not willing to pay the full cost of a program with tuition. "Almost all of the successful programs, wherever they are, occur when a company or government has agreed to pick up the cost of the program," he said.

Over the years, the programs that have been offered have almost always been limited by the fact that outsiders went into China with a fixed amount of money. "The money runs out fairly quickly and then it's very difficult to continue the program," Alutto said, "unless you start a program in which you train the Chinese faculty so that over time it becomes a Chinese program. At that point you are giving a Chinese degree, not an American degree. There's nothing wrong with an American university helping a Chinese university upgrade its management education capabilities, but the question is, do you want your name on the degree?"

The cost of a high quality American MBA degree in a developing country like China will probably be too high, except in those niches where a major corporation or a well-endowed foundation can afford to fund it, educators say.

"The big need for the 1.4 million MBAs is not going to be served that way," Alutto said. "That need is going to be served by a variety of high volume, moderate quality experiences on the part of individuals, whether that is by having lots of MBA programs that really don't meet international standards or by long distance delivery techniques by people who are doing high quality work."

Despite the high hopes of Lu and other Chinese leaders who see the value of American-style management education and want it for their country, the Chinese people may have to set their sights a bit lower.

"The issue for young Chinese students learning American management is finding a middle way," said Alutto. "They see the constraints in state enterprises and they know change has to happen. The middle way has to reflect Western economics. But, at the same time, it has to reflect the realities of operating in a country with over a billion people, with all of the divisiveness that occurs when you have so many different languages being taught. The constant stress always has been to modify and adapt Western techniques to the realities of operating in China."

A centuries-old, 4,000-mile wall doesn't come down easily.