CSUN Exchange Program : Business Know-How to Be Taught in China
Local business people, many of them from the San Fernando Valley, will go to China starting this spring as part of an unusual exchange program that is helping to teach a communist society how to manage an increasingly Western-style economy.
Their one-week stints at a school in Guang Zhou, China, stem from an agreement signed there on Dec. 13 by officials from the Guang Zhou Institute for Commercial Executive Development and the Bureau of Business Services and Research at California State University, Northridge. The bureau, part of CSUN’s business school, researches local business trends and conducts adult education courses.
Guang Zhou, which Americans formerly called Canton, is in southern China, about 90 miles up the Pearl River from Hong Kong. The 100 students of the municipally run Guang Zhou Institute all come from the city.
‘Revitalizing Schools’
“They’re revitalizing their business schools and they want help,” said Sonja Marchand, the director of CSUN’s business services bureau and the person who represented the university in discussions that led to the agreement. “The emphasis is on non-academics, people with hands-on business experience.”
Marchand said that, as part of the agreement, Cal State Northridge will also host teachers from the institute coming to this country to share information about their country and study American business techniques.
“The institute will assist these American business people with contacts in China if they wish to do business there. It’s a good opportunity for companies that want to explore business opportunities in China to get somebody over there somewhat inexpensively,” Marchand said.
Marchand and James Robertson, dean of the School of Business Administration and Economics at CSUN, were in China in October for initial discussions of the agreement, and Marchand returned in December to sign it.
Other Schools Involved
There are other exchange agreements between American and Chinese schools, but the teachers are usually professional academics, according to people knowledgeable about the subject.
Marchand said the CSUN agreement is a spin-off of a scholar-exchange arrangement the school has had with Jinan University in Guang Zhou since 1981. Chen Ji-Wen, the director of the business institute and a former head of the economics department at Jinan University, has two daughters attending Cal State Northridge, Marchand said.
Various departments at CSUN are involved in 10 separate student and faculty exchange agreements with Chinese universities, Robertson said.
“It’s the result of the work of several Chinese faculty members who have really gone out of their way to promote this,” said Robertson.
Marchand said the exchange agreement covers the next three years, or six semesters. She said local business people would conduct four one-week workshop and lecture programs each semester. The courses include marketing and advertising, international law and contracts, quality control, inventory control, purchasing and physical distribution management, which involves such tasks as the packing, shipping and receiving of goods. Marchand is in charge of selecting the Americans who will teach at the institute. She said most of the people she has in mind are from the Valley.
She said Evelyn Kibrick, a Northridge marketing consultant, will probably be the first of the 24 teachers to go, leaving in April.
The second person scheduled to go is John Miller, who she said is the publisher of a Los Angeles-based magazine called “Entrepreneur” and a professor of management science at Cal State Northridge.
Marchand said the American teachers will communicate with their Chinese students through interpreters.
Since 1979, when the U.S. re-established diplomatic ties with China, at least 63 American colleges and universities have participated in exchange agreements with schools in Communist China, according to Joyce Madancy, a researcher with the Washington-based Committee on Scholarly Communication with the Peoples Republic of China.
The committee, funded by the U.S. Information Agency and the Ford Foundation, is regarded as the most knowledgeable group on American teaching exchanges with China.
Madancy said she knew of one other case in which such agreement was focused mainly on business teaching. That program involved professors. Of the agreement that the Guang Zhou Institute has with Cal State Northridge, where most of the American teachers would be non-academics, she said, “I’ve never heard of such an arrangement.
Marchand and Robertson said they returned from their trips to China greatly impressed by the degree to which the country has adopted Western economic goals. “The business decisions are no longer politically controlled,” said Robertson.
Robertson said that, when he was in China in September, 1983, to arrange a symposium on international tourism for Chinese people in the tourist industry, approval of the political bureaucracy was crucial. But “this time we signed an agreement regarding the Guang Zhou Institute without having to go to any political figure for approval.”
