Zuckerberg Named To Business School Board

Beijing, China

In other words, a Tsinghua SEM board meeting is becoming East Asia’s answer to Davos. But it’s more than trips to the Forbidden City or the zoo that draws these luminaries to Beijing. Basically, the board is the gateway to leading Chinese government officials, responsible for 1.3 billion potential consumers.

For example, the board includes party heavyweights like GUO Shuqing, a former chairman of China’s Securities Regulatory Commission and current Governor of the Shandong province, home of 95 million people and one of China’s wealthiest provinces. The board also boasts China’s current finance minister; a member of China’s seven-person Politburo Standing Committee, the country’s highest decision-making body; the head of the People’s Bank of China, which oversees the country’s monetary policy; a vice chairman of China’s top economic planning agency; a former chairman of China’s second largest bond issuer; and a vice premier who reports directly to the premier heading the Chinese civil bureaucracy.

So if you’re looking to curry favor with the party and navigate China’s bureaucracy to sell your products, the Tsinghua SEM board is the place to start.

Xi Jinping

AMONG THE TOP SCHOOLS IN CHINA

And Tsinghua University certainly carries clout in China. Xi Jinping and Hu Jintao – the current and former heads of the party respectively, hold engineering degrees from the university. While the full-time MBA program doesn’t supply ranking data to outlets like The Financial Times, the school’s EMBA program – done in partnership with INSEAD – is ranked #3 globally by The Financial Times. Bottom line: A degree from Tsinghua University is a gold ticket to access and influence in Chinese circles.

Tsinghua SEM was founded in 1984 and began piloting an MBA program in 1991. Six years later, it partnered with MIT’s Sloan School of Management for a joint international MBA program (which was eventually folded into Tsinghua’s existing full-time MBA program in 2013). Overall, the program has graduated over 10,000 MBAs.

The program’s biggest draw is its ability to immerse students into Chinese language and culture. At the same time, it is friendly to international students, with its full-time joint MIT MBA curriculum taught in English (though Chinese instruction is available for many foundational and elective courses). And the program is based in Beijing, the headquarters for 44 Fortune 500 companies…perfect for internships and starting careers. And that’s only reinforced by Tsinghua University’s larger 190,000 person network (which includes 19,000 SEM grads as well).

Tsinghua-MIT Students

The program maintains a strong international flavor, with 45% of the 100 students in the joint MIT MBA program holding passports from 16 countries outside China.  In fact, the program draws faculty from both Tsinghua and MIT, with Sloan professors often traveling to Beijing to teach their courses. Select students can also travel to MIT for a year to study.

CAN ZUCKERBERG SUCCEED?

The partnership between Tsinghua SEM and MIT Sloan is one that Zuckerberg would like to emulate in China. While the “Golden Shield Project” – which allegedly employs two million people to police China’s cyber borders – shows few signs of relenting, some experts, such as Topeka Capital Markets’ Anthony, are still bullish on Chinese officials opening up to Facebook. “I don’t know the exact timing, but this is a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if,’” he tells Bloomberg Businessweek.

To do that, Zuckerberg will need humility, finesse, patience, and flexibility – the traits that were anathema to him in his pirate startup days. Then again, sometimes being a rebel means being adult enough to take advice and forge compromise. It may not win Zuckerberg any plaudits among the hackathon set, but it could do something with far greater impact: Opening China up to long, tedious, and unsexy progress.