As China implements its Belt and Road Initiative to finance and build both infrastructure and political influence around the world, business schools are taking steps to explore the implications.

Five years after President Xi Jinping unveiled the BRI, a number of business schools in Asia have begun exploring it as a theme for: teaching, research, to attract students and to forge deeper academic partnerships with regional counterparts.

At the same time, progress is gradual as schools seek clarity over what exactly the policy is, which countries it covers, the extent of public and private sector commitment and the practical challenges of competing priorities and scarce resources in developing their activities.

At the Guanghua School of Management at Peking University, one of the most prestigious in the country, officials in April launched a Belt and Road Institute, designed to research, to educate and to support the initiative.

“We want to promote greater collaboration and investment abroad to generate insights and show how it affects Chinese companies,” says Li Jin, professor of finance. One of its first outputs was a Belt and Road Executive Programme this year, with Chinese business sponsorship to cover costs for 50 senior diplomats from 36 countries working in China to discuss the initiative.

As the Guanghua school prepares to promote applications for a second iteration of that course, it is also seeking candidates by next February for a Belt and Road Fellows programme. That will allow academics to spend up to a year on its campus conducting research.

It is creating a study centre and case-writing unit to generate materials on the BRI, and a leadership lab to develop leaders from the region. It is also exploring partnerships with other academic institutions, businesses and individuals and is considering the creation of a joint undergraduate degree programme focused on business and economics, possibly including Moscow State University.

Peking University is not alone. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has gone further than most. It is recruiting for a pioneering part-time $130,000 English-language executive MBA focused on Eurasia and Belt and Road, offered as a joint diploma with the Skolkovo School of Management in Moscow. The course is to begin this November.

Steven DeKrey, associate dean at HKUST, who is also responsible for a wider partnership with Skolkovo, says: “It will have all the basic core courses, but also Belt and Road as a central theme, alongside innovation and leadership. We will play up the cultural diversity of the class.” He aims to recruit about 40 in the first cohort of experienced executives to take part, and estimates about half will be Russian.

The course will involve a number of four-day weekend modules for participants in Moscow and Hong Kong, as well as Israel, Switzerland and in Silicon Valley, but also in core Belt and Road countries. The latter will include Armenia and Kazakhstan, where participants will visit the Kazakh capital, Astana, as well as the freight terminal on the Chinese border that transfers rail cargo between the regions’ different gauges.

A number of other schools are starting to offer scholarships to students from BRI countries to attend their courses, including Beijing’s Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. But Xiang Bing, its dean, stresses his international focus is more tightly concentrated on the “Confucian economic sphere”, including Japan, Korea, Vietnam and greater China.

Guanghua at Peking University is offering 15 scholarships for MBAs, drawn from countries including Nepal, Pakistan, Indonesia and Venezuela. Those choices highlight the fact that institutions are offering varying perspectives on how to define BRI countries, including those in Africa, Latin America and even mainland Europe.

One business school dean highlights concerns that deeper academic partnerships, including joint or dual diplomas and exchanges with universities, in many “core” BRI countries remain difficult because of the relatively modest international reputations of potential partners.

Furthermore, most business schools in Asia are experiencing greater demand for courses focused on other themes, led by artificial intelligence, big data analytics, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Yubo Chen, associate dean at Tsinghua’s School of Economics and Management, says: “Central government has raised the Belt and Road Initiative, but our programmes are with institutions in Paris, Singapore and so on.”

As one student at CKGSB says: “We hear more about Belt and Road when we go out of China. We are focused more on western subjects.”

Source: Financial Times