Dear Faculty, Staff, Students and Alumni,

As CEIBS campuses are waking up to the splendour of the first dawn of 2018 in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Zurich in Switzerland and Accra in Ghana, we wish you – including 20,000 CEIBS alumni in over 80 countries and regions – a very Happy New Year.

CEIBS has enjoyed 23 years of impressive development as an international business school deeply rooted in China. With China gradually marching onto the global centre stage, CEIBS has also grown in phases: learning from the West, reaching out globally, along with integrating into the world and contributing China’s wisdom and global governance knowledge to the world. Today’s world is still rapidly changing, seeing intensified globalisation, informatisation and cultural diversification; all while the reform of global governance and international order is picking up momentum. Riding on such historical waves, CEIBS – as the cradle of China’s business management education – is feeling the joy of excitement, but also the weight of responsibility.

We are pleased to report that we have achieved our initial goal of becoming a top business school in Asia and are now dedicated to building a world-class business school. CEIBS is no stranger to success: in 2017, three of the school’s programmes – MBA, EMBA and Executive Education – continued to be ranked by the Financial Times among the Top 30 in the world, with the MBA programme ranked No. 1 in Asia and 11th in the world. CEIBS’ 5-year-old part-time Finance MBA has also become a reputable programme that continuously supplies fresh talents who are helping to shape Shanghai as an international financial centre. We launched a new course called Key Talent Programme for Chinese Companies Going Global to help Chinese firms tackle the challenges of going abroad as they respond to the country’s globally impactful Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). We also launched a joint hospitality EMBA programme with École hôtelière de Lausanne (EHL) to promote China’s service-oriented economic transformation. On the entrepreneurship front, in 2017 CEIBS China Entrepreneurial Leadership Camp featured themes of lean start-up, platform strategy and organisational innovation, and is widely popular with entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, CEIBS was invited by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) to work together with seven other top business schools in Europe and the US to formulate the exam and evaluation criteria for business executives. In addition, the EFMD’s Business School Impact Survey (BSIS) officially recognised CEIBS’ significant regional influence in Shanghai and in China as a whole.

Knowledge creation is one of our core missions. Chinese companies need management insight crafted from a deep understanding of local practices; the world’s development calls for wisdom and solutions from China and the East.  CEIBS’ curriculum has always enjoyed an advantage because of its seamless balancing of the local and the global, the theoretical and the practical, its ability to tell ‘a good Chinese story’ through case teaching. We are committed to creating the world’s best China cases. With the support of the Shanghai Municipal Government, we initiated building an international-standard business case library in China. The project began in 2014; and we now have 1,033 China cases in our collection. CEIBS academic staff wrote one-third of these cases and half of them are from alumni companies. Business schools at home and abroad extensively use our cases. Moreover, CEIBS maintains high academic standards that have earned the school global recognition. For two years in a row CEIBS professors topped Elsevier’s ‘most cited Chinese scholars’ list in the categories of Business, Management and Accounting, accounting for one third of the total number of selected scholars.

CEIBS also has a strong presence in the areas of political consultation and advice, theoretical innovation and public diplomacy. We established the Economic Research Institute of Central and Eastern Europe (ERICEE) in collaboration with the Sino-CEE Fund. We are also engaging in multilateral cooperation with leading business schools from Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, aiming to contribute intellectual support to the ambitious China-led BRI. Meanwhile, CEIBS Europe Forum 2017 was hosted in five cities: London, Paris, Zurich, Munich and Warsaw. These series of events focused on identifying new opportunities for Europe brought by the BRI and building platforms for cooperation and mutual trust between Chinese and European entrepreneurs. Among the keynote speakers were Chinese Ambassador to UK Liu Xiaoming, Chinese Ambassador to Poland Xu Jian, former French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin and former Italian Prime Minister and EU Commission President Romano Prodi. A few distinguished Chinese alumni whose companies have ‘gone global’ shared their China stories and experiences during the forums, showcasing their ‘China-style’ successes. Further afield, CEIBS Africa Campus has nurtured a group of African alumni who have become the ambassadors of China-Africa economic and trade cooperation. They are the promoters of China-Africa bilateral relations and practitioners of the BRI.

According to the data we have so far, among our 20,000+ alumni worldwide we have about 100 Chinese central and local government officials, 247 founders or chairmen of the board of listed companies, 6 top executives of Forbes Global 500 companies, and between the year 2000 and 2016, 15 have been selected for CCTV’s annual recognition of eminent business figures. Furthermore, about 10,000 alumni are in various management positions in state-owned enterprises, multinational corporations and the private sector. They are the driving force shaping China’s modern economic system. It is also worth noting that, of CEIBS’ 2,400 international alumni, more than half chose to stay in China after graduation, making important contributions to economic exchange between China and the rest of the world.

We believe the school’s future is tied to yours:  CEIBS alumni are the school’s most valuable asset, while the school provides a solid hub of knowledge and support for alumni. In the Spring of 2017, the third CEIBS Alumni Association Council was set up in Nanjing, launching a new framework to strengthen the Alumni Association, a landmark moment in the school’s history. Under the leadership of the new council, CEIBS Alumni Association has engaged in a series of successful projects: jointly issuing a CEIBS Card with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China; the publication of CEIBS Alumni Corporate Social Responsibility Proposal, the launch of an exhibition on alumni’s philanthropic achievements, the first CEIBS Alumni Industrial Park project with Zhenjiang Municipality, and CEIBS Alumni Association (Suzhou) chose Suzhou Industrial Park as the location for its HQ. All of these forward-looking initiatives play an important role in promoting social responsibility and helping the local economy while utilising the CEIBS advantage to help alumni development.  We want to thank you for everything you do to contribute towards the continuing success of this extraordinary institution in the future.

Let us never forget where we came from and what we stand for.  We started with a dream to ‘help people build character and virtue’, and a dream to become a world-class business school. In the course of the past 23 years of development, we have gained trust, built camaraderie, and earned respect. Let us never lose sight of our mission, and continue to lead China’s management education, to promote economic development and social progress. Dear alumni, wherever you are and at whatever stage of your career, remember that as a leader of this era, you will inevitably shoulder more social responsibility. We hope you will always be guided by compassion that spurs you to do ‘good’ for the society.  CEIBS will always be a home for you – we applaud your achievements, share your worries, and we hope that you come back home often. We look forward to working with you as together we can continue to strive for the development of a better world. 

Now we have come to the end of Year 2017. The sky is high and the view is clear. With the prospect of a splendid Spring at the forefront of our minds, the days of a new beginning are here – a time to reflect on the past, a time to renew hopes for the future.

We wish you and your family a very Happy New Year!

Presidents of CEIBS
Prof Li Mingjun     Prof Pedro Nueno