Cheung Kong MBA Blog

This is Zhang Liang writing from Global MarCom team in Beijing.

I just came back to Beijing from a 5-day trip in Seoul. We talked with potential applicants, professionals, new entrants, and alumni about the history, development and future goals of Cheung Kong GSB and its MBA program. Also, we visited media (JoongAng IIbo), corporations (Hanwha Group, Kookmin Bank) and universities (Korea University MBA) with a hope to build more awareness in Korea.

Korea is indeed close to China geographically and culturally. One participant attending the info session on Apr 29 night talked with me about Fengshui for about 20 minutes when the info session ended. He's interested to build a network in China and loves close bonding among classmates in the East Asian way. It's not a surprise that he was willing to attend Prof Teng Binsheng's lecture the next day on Apr 30 after I told him. One day later, he did show up again!

Joon, our MBA Class of 06 student, and Perry, the new entrant to our MBA Class of 08, helped us a great deal during our stay in Seoul. They set up a Cheung Kong MBA community in Korea on freechal.com where they have enrolled over 100 members, more than the size of our annual MBA intake! Take a look if you're interested: http://home.freechal.com/CKMBA/

It's also my first time staying with our Cheung Kong MBA students for nearly one week. They're really energetic and smart as I was told before. The 55-people class has one postdocs and two doctors! The bus they took commuting between universities and companies was never an ideal place to sleep. Sometimes they sang songs one by one from the first row to the end of the bus. By the way, Perry sang very well a song of Jay Chow (周杰伦), Juhuatai (菊花台) in which I could here clearer lyrics than Jay Chow did.

Look forward to meet Joon and Perry again in Beijing, Shanghai or Seoul!

The 2008 Beijing Expat Show was a huge success in many ways. During the three day event, we were able to introduce Cheung Kong's MBA program to a whole new pool of potential applicants and audiences. These are people you normally won't get to meet by simply sitting behind a desk, sifting through applications and resumes. 

At the same time, we found a lot of potential business partners that we could develop and work with in future events and sponsorships. Great contacts, potential candidates, and excellent networking opportunities with the expat community in China. This was the reason we participated in the first place. With that, we're eagerly looking forward to the next Expat Show! 

Cheung Kong GSB has started the Spring season with several high caliber business lectures by professors and outside speakers. A good place to network and experience being back in class, Cheung Kong Beijing Campus is in the center of the city, easy to reach before or after work.

On Wednesday 2 April, IE Business School Professor Cardoza presented a history of industrialization with strong links to his own background. A native of Columbia, Prof. Cardoza looked at economic growth over the past two decades in three regions: East Asia, Latin America, and Iberia (Spain and Portugal). The figures showed East Asia with a lead in nearly every category, including education.

An audience of over fifty expatriates living in Beijing, including a senior attaché from the Ecuadorian Embassy and twenty executives from IE Business School China Residency Program, posed a wide range of questions to the professor and stayed on for Iberian-themed discussion over a glass of wine and traditional Spanish tapas.

This is Craig from the Beijing office currently in Shanghai looking forward to meetings tomorrow and Friday with Cheung Kong Associate Dean Zheng Yusheng, who directs the MBA program and is now back from Wharton, as well as the MBA administrative team in Shanghai led by Zhao Lijing. Jonathan Tang from the Beijing office is in town as well, so we should have plenty to keep us busy the next two days.

On my way here I had a bit of a panic when I got to the just-opened Beijing airport terminal 3 (it's very impressive, by the way, grand and Chinese feeling, a bit like a modern version of the Forbidden City), and was told that my flight would be leaving from the old terminal 2 building. As I expected, the physical facilities are much more impressive than the soft services - crowds of confused people were roaming everywhere in the vast terminal, many in a panic like me because they had been misinformed and didn't know who to believe.

I fought my way into an elevator and out exit 5 where a group seemed to be waiting for the inter-terminal bus to arrive. Luckily a guy motioned us all to an unmarked area about 200 meters away where the bus was waiting, or I probably would have missed my flight.

Once I had arrived and checked into my hotel, I wandered out for a bowl of giant Shanghai-style wontons, which made me glad to have made the trip.

Just when I thought you couldn't possibly top the Beijing professor talk, the Shanghai professor talk featuring Professor Teng Bingsheng took the the standard to a whole new level. We had around 300 people in attendance at the famed Shanghai Concert Hall on Sunday. On top of that, we had quite a few international faces in the crowd as well. 

I"m pretty impressed with the qualifications of our professors already. But 300 people??!! That's almost like a mini rock concert. I'm anxious to see how Guangzhou will turn out. Can it top this one??? We'll see.