U.S., Chinese governments extend SUNY-Buffalo China MBA program

Business America, Jan 16, 1989

Despite criticism that Chinese graduates of Western Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs have had difficulty finding jobs in their homeland that fully use their newly acquired skills, representatives of the U.S. and Chinese Governments have extended for five years the State University of New York at Buffalo's MBA program in the People's Republic of China. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The protocol also extends other management programs at the National Center for Industrial Science and Technology Management Development in Dalian, China.

The initialing ceremony, which came at the end of a meeting of the MBA program's advisory board, preceded commencement for the program's third class. The commencement speaker was Hong Hu, Secretary General of the Chinese State Commission for Restructuring the Economic Systems. Both the advisory board meeting and the commencement were held on the SUNY-Buffalo Amherst campus.

"The initialing is based in part on the satisfaction of both countries in the accomplishments of the last five years," said Joseph A. Alutto, Dean of the SUNY-Buffalo School of Management and Director of the MBA program. "It recognizes the program as a resource for China and U.S. and China trade relations."

The criticisms that have been made are not of the MBA program itself, but they are references to China's ability to use the MBA graduates, Alutto said.

"The protocol ratifies or reconfirms China's commitment to using graduates of MBA programs as resources," he said. "It confirms China's commitment to use the skills of the graduates in significant ways, or else China would not be renewing the project."

In addressing the criticisms, Alutto noted that while there are some instances of underemployment of graduates, "At the present time most of our MBAs have returned to or been placed in positions leading to the type of work envisioned when the program was first proposed."

These include Liang Guang-hai, Vice Mayor of Rizhao City in Shandong Province; Chen Zue-zhong, Vice Director of the Jia Mu Si Paper Mill who was recently noted by The Economist for the negotiation of innovative trading agreements; Wang Chuan-shan, on assignment by the Machinery Industry to head up the new business development operations of a rapidly growing enterprise; Wang Heng, Production Manager of the China National Tobacco Corporation who recently returned to China after an extended assignment with R.J. Reynolds; Chen Xian-xing, who was originally with the Dalian Heavy Machinery Plant but was transferred to a new U.S.-Sino joint venture in the Dalian Economic Zone; and Li Bao-cun, who works in the Hong Kong office of the China United Shipbuilding Company, Ltd. and deals with its joint-venture and jointcooperation activities.

But despite these success stories, there are areas of concern among some graduates, Alutto said. The reintroduction of the MBAs to China and their old work units is a delicate process affected by some factors unique to the political and social structure in China, as well as some factors common to all industrialized nations, he said.

Although Americans tend to think of China as being highly centralized and in need of greater decentralization, in reality policy is centrally developed and pronounced, while implementation is usually highly decentralized.

"The irony," Alutto said, "is that while China now has a central policy that encourages managers to find the most productive outlet for their talents, in reality this policy is implemented through individual work units. These separate enterprises traditionally have hoarded resources under the assumption that they might prove valuable in the future.

"To now argue that underused MBAs be reassigned by Beijing to more productive work is to advocate a degree of centralized national policy implementation that does not follow tradition and is contrary to the economic decentral ization that is the heart of current reforms," he said.

It would be better, Alutto proposed, to allow enterprises to bid for the services of underused Labor by facilitating overall worker mobility, which is the position taken during the recently completed 13th Party Congress. In fact, he noted, such between-enterprise recruitment is now under way and several SUNY-Buffalo graduates have changed employing organizations.

One specific policy gives foreigninvested enterprises the authority to hire Chinese employees directly, and instructs Chinese enterprises to support this type of worker/manager mobility. "In the case of trained managers, including our program graduates, there is some evidence this policy is being actively implemented," Alutto said.

He also said that Chinese MBAs have noted that their superiors are not as supportive as they would wish. But this reaction is not uncommon among new American MBAs, he said. And in China, where seniority traditionally has been more important than ability in determining job status, "this lack of encouragement is to be expected."