Chapter 6: Teaching Leadership to Executives in the People’s Republic of China

As the world’s largest and fastest growing economy, the People’s Republic of China presents a compelling arena for the teaching and mastery of leadership competencies. With its recent entry into the WTO, China faces a multitude of daunting and rapidly changing challenges to its leaders at all levels, presented internally by its 1.2 billion population and externally by socioeconomic forces having increasingly open access to the Chinese market. WTO membership will abet the ongoing restructuring of China’s economy and lead to massive layoffs at China’s giant but inefficient state-owned enterprises, which employs more than half of the country’s workers (Blustein & Chandler, 2001). Membership also brings added pressure to meet tighter WTO standards for protection against piracy of patents, copyrights, and intellectual property—a systemic cultural and economic problem and major criticism of China as it has sought to become a world-class economic player (Marquand, 2002). And Beijing is particularly concerned about its vast agricultural sector, which employs its rural majority, and how increased unrest and instability may follow the flood of imported grain and other crops as tariffs fall (Eckholm, 2002; Roberts & Webb, 2002). Although many Chinese enterprises will continue to step up their recruitment of global leadership talent to help them prepare for these challenges and the greatly increased competition attending WTO membership, Chinese universities also have begun to churn out an increasingly educated and technically skilled workforce to help meet from within the growing demand for leadership talent in China (Neuman, 2002).