China’s Elite College of Capitalism
Chinese graduate student Xu Shiku is an expert in debt financing. He wears a Western-style tweed jacket and is well versed in business terms ranging from defaults to debentures. He’s also a Communist.
“I wrote my thesis about the international bond market,” Xu told a reporter in heavily accented English at a Peking symposium on financial markets sponsored by the state-run People’s Bank of China and the New York Stock Exchange.
As for the sophisticated terminology used at the unusual symposium, Xu said, “I think a lot of what was said was too easy.”
Xu, 22, is a student in the People’s Bank of China Graduate Division, an elite school of about 200 young people chosen from universities nationwide for adeptness at comprehending Western finance and economics. Fluency in English is required.
Educate Next Generation
Founded in 1983, the school reflects Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s efforts to educate the next generation for the awesome job of modernizing this nation of 1.02 billion people and integrating it into the world economy.
After a curriculum that lasts from two to three years, graduates are assigned posts at People’s Bank branches or the central administration, and some eventually win positions overseas.
Although the students are required to know the standard theories about Marxist economics, they major in topics that include international finance, insurance and economic history.
Like American counterparts at institutions such as Wharton or Harvard, People’s Bank students practice simulations of corporate decision making under extreme competitive pressure. They even play a stock market game to test their savvy at speculation.
Prestige Business School
With a faculty that includes Americans--the commercial officer at the U.S. Embassy is among them--the People’s Bank Graduate Division has become the most prestigious business school of China, although it is housed in a bleak, barracks-style compound among the cabbage farms of northern Peking.
Western visitors are often surprised at the students’ sophistication. During a visit by a Wall Street delegation led by John J. Phelan Jr., chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, the executives of some of America’s biggest financial institutions marveled at their questions, which covered topics ranging from loan guarantees to the “Big Bang” deregulation at the London Stock Exchange.
“This one guy gave a whole recitation on the Glass-Steagall Banking Act of 1932. Most of us couldn’t do that,” said Arthur Samansky, a managing director of the NYSE and former special assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York.
The questioners even impressed Phelan, who has acquired a no-nonsense reputation in his tenure as head of the world’s biggest securities market. The New York Stock Exchange later signed an agreement with the People’s Bank under which its graduate students will be able to train and study at the Big Board.
