Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
The new course Business and Management in Global Context: China and Asia began at ICEF in the second semester of this year. Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor, Director of the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University Alexey Aleksandrovich Maslov talks about the features of the course, the reasons for its creation and the practical focus of the classes.
– Today, several courses dedicated to the modern development of Asia and the economy of China are taught at various faculties at the HSE. Alexey Alexandrovich, what is special about your course, what are its features?
First, it is important to note that having multiple courses covering Asia from different perspectives is the right approach. One of the main problems with the modern education system is that most educational programs are traditionally Western-oriented. This applies not only to history, philosophy and culture, but also to practical disciplines such as business, entrepreneurship and law.
Historically, educational trajectories have been built with an emphasis on interaction with Western markets. This vector is formed in school and continues at university. However, when faced with the need for intensive interaction with China and Asia as a whole, we were not quite ready for this. A large-scale restructuring of approaches to teaching is required, which is impossible within the framework of one course or even one university. Now the entire Russian education system is working on this task – after all, it is important to understand where the personnel comes from.
That’s why it’s especially valuable that there are several different courses, each offering its own perspective on the issue. My course is about business and entrepreneurship in Asian countries. We look at purely practical aspects: we put ourselves in the shoes of someone who comes to China, India or Southeast Asia and tries to set up a business, both large and small. Together with the students, we go through all the stages: from cultural differences and the negotiation process to checking partners, investing and withdrawing investments from China or India. The course is based not only on theoretical observations, but also on solving practical problems.
An important element of the course is the analysis of real cases of Russian and Western companies operating in the Chinese and Asian markets. We study both successful examples and cases of failures with multi-billion dollar losses in order to understand the reasons for successes and mistakes.
The third key aspect is the development of practical recommendations for yourself and potential employers. After all, entering the Asian market is a long-term process that requires an assessment of the dynamics of the region’s development for years and decades to come. Perhaps, not China, but India, or, conversely, Vietnam, will be more promising.
Our course is unique precisely because of this practical approach. It is not a business school in the classical sense, but combines case analysis with fundamental knowledge. Here, oriental studies expertise is integrated with practical issues of business and entrepreneurship.
– ICEF is actively implementing a dual degree program with the Chinese university SWUFE, one of the largest Chinese universities specializing in training specialists in finance and business analytics. What is the most important thing a student should be prepared for when coming to study at a Chinese university? What recommendations and advice can you give to ICEF students who will go to study at SWUFE?
It should be taken into account that despite the openness of Chinese universities to cooperation, many of them focus on ideological aspects. Students may find that lectures include presentation of Xi Jinping’s ideas. This is certainly important, but does not always provide the practical skills for which foreign students come. Therefore, the key task of every student who goes to study at a Chinese university is to learn how to extract the maximum useful information and not limit themselves to the official program.
Secondly, you need to prepare yourself psychologically for studying in China. At first glance, everything looks perfect: modern campuses, comfortable dormitories, open teachers who speak good English. This creates the feeling that the learning process is going smoothly. However, in practice, some students note that they were sometimes more entertained than taught. This is a feature of the system: Chinese universities strive first and foremost to create a comfortable environment for foreigners, but do not always overload them with academic requirements.
Therefore, it is important to take the initiative: actively participate in discussions, ask questions, find opportunities to communicate with Chinese students and entrepreneurs. Chinese education provides many opportunities, but a student must be able to use them. First of all, you need to consider studying at a Chinese university as gaining practical knowledge and making connections.
You have to understand that China is a country that, on the one hand, is quite comfortable while you are studying there, but on the other hand, it is very strict in its disciplinary rules. And not only can you not skip classes, but you have to prepare, you have to understand that behind the Chinese friendliness there is a rather pragmatic approach. I know many cases when not only our Russian students, but also Western students were expelled from universities.
The third point I want to emphasize is that in China, students have access to a huge amount of data that is inaccessible in Russia for various reasons.
These are statistical databases, business databases, the ability to check Chinese partners, and so on. Take advantage of this to learn how to work with a large array of information. Unlike Western business schools, where after graduation your connections with the educational office are maintained – including access to the library – in China, unfortunately, this is not the case.
Another important point. If you are going to work with Asia in the future (not necessarily with China), you can continue your studies there in a master’s degree, in postgraduate studies. If you have such an intention, then pay attention to the universities of Hong Kong, Macau and others of this Asian world.
– How will this course help ICEF graduates navigate their careers? At our regular meetings with potential employers, we constantly hear that “specialists in Asia or the East are needed.” But this sounds too vague and abstract.
30-40 years ago, the main interest in Asia was shown mainly by historians, philologists, writers, cultural scientists, philosophers. This interest continues today.
But employers need people with practical skills. This primarily concerns the economic block: here our potential employers are the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Economic Development, various large financial and investment corporations. They want to get not just a person with knowledge of an oriental language or oriental culture, they want to get a person who understands how to make a project, how to build a deal, how to get out of a serious business situation.
This specialist should not complete his studies later, having come to these organizations, but he himself should offer his ideas. Secondly, in addition to large organizations and corporations, we communicate with the middle level of business, which works with Asia on individual projects. For example, these are projects related to science, education, IT technology, artificial intelligence, which is rapidly developing in Asia.
Building relationships, checking partners is also an important part of career prospects. And one more thing. You have to understand that you can’t “teach Asia” or “teach China”.
To work, you need to know a very large set of knowledge from economics and history to culture and entrepreneurship. In this sense, we are trying to provide many useful components on the course – like a Lego constructor, from which the graduate’s potential career will be assembled. The main point that this program is set up for is early orientation to the market, to the employer.
Upon completion of the program, graduates will have a clear idea of what and where they can do professionally.
– The program is aimed at training specialists to work with the markets of China and Asia. Hundreds of Russian companies have already rushed there today. To what extent is the Russian market generally ready for such cooperation?
We see a huge wave of interest in training specialists in Asian countries, in the broadest sense of the word, but, first of all, in China. About a dozen, if not more, such programs have now started on the Russian higher education market – from Moscow to the Far East. It is not difficult to create a program, it is difficult to find specialists who really know how to work with this region and build all the components.
It is not enough to simply show, say, economic models or investment methods. It is important to show how to negotiate, how to conduct negotiations, what real difficulties a person may face in a country in the region. This follows exclusively from practical experience.
One of the paradoxes that we see now is that despite the huge interest in working with Asian business, we do not have a single systematic textbook on business culture in Asia. Also, you will not find any serious developments on recommendations, for example, on creating enterprises in Asia, etc. In this aspect, despite the activity, the Russian market is only just forming.
That is why our program is one of the pioneer programs.
– So, the prospects for ICEF graduates, financiers and economists, in relation to Russian-Chinese business are opening up great? And not only in terms of our graduates going to work in China or India, but we are talking about working in joint intercountry enterprises and projects?
Yes, that’s right. We need to know what difficulties real business faces and how we can solve them in this sense.
The first difficulty is misunderstanding each other. It is not about language, linguistic understanding – Chinese or Vietnamese can be learned with some difficulty. This misunderstanding is psychological. That is why it is so important, first of all, to be able to establish contacts, communicate, tell the stories that our Asian partners are ready to hear, to be able to joke, to be able to get out of difficult situations with dignity. When you work in Asia, it is always a challenge, always a test. A test of psychological stability.
Secondly, it is the ability to establish contacts at the enterprise or organization level. After all, very often – and this is the biggest problem – Russian business offers the Chinese to work in those areas and in the form in which China does not work: there is no such tradition, or the legislation does not allow it. In the same way, Chinese or Indian businessmen, when they come to Russia, offer things in the paradigm in which Russia does not work.
Our task is to prepare a new generation of people who, on the one hand, can bring Russian business to Asia, serve it not only financially, not only economically, but also politically, and on the other hand, create joint projects with Asian partners, bringing them, on the contrary, to Russia and offering those options that are acceptable and understandable for Asian partners.
In this sense, we sometimes really just talk from scratch about how the thinking of the Chinese, Indians or Vietnamese is generally structured.
– Please give a couple of such examples of a complete discrepancy between a hypothetical Russian entrepreneur and an entrepreneur from India or China.
Just recently, a large Russian company involved in biopharmacology entered China with a very good product. And the Chinese market was very happy to accept this product. But the company, following some of its own ideas, opens its headquarters in Shanghai, a very expensive and, of course, developed city in China, and hires a large staff. And suddenly it turns out that the cost of maintaining the business is such that, as they say, the game is not worth the candle. Because all the promised special conditions for reducing taxes, improving conditions and even additional financing from the Chinese side are valid in completely different zones, and not in Shanghai.
All they had to do was study which zones in China make sense to open this type of company. Instead of growing and developing, this company spent almost a year re-registering in another tax jurisdiction, in another city, transferring its facilities and renegotiating the terms. This is a serious loss of market share.
Another example. One of the Far Eastern Russian regions has repeatedly offered Chinese companies to come to their region and set up their enterprises there. The Russian side promised to allocate a site and capacities, and expected the Chinese partners to build a plant and a shopping center. At the same time, they relied on the right political trends – a turn to the East, interaction between the countries.
For almost two years, all these proposals rained down on the Chinese, but nothing happened until we explained: China never comes to an empty site. China always comes to where there is already production, where there is already a market.
China is ready to provide additional financing, if necessary – to buy out shares of companies, but China never creates its own production from scratch, even in the rarest cases. And as soon as we explained this point, it turned out that there is a small operating plant in the region with which it was possible to create a joint venture. Which was done – and at the beginning of 2025 this Russian-Chinese enterprise started working.
There are examples when Russian companies, entering a country like India, seemingly very positively disposed towards Russia, without understanding the intricacies of Indian politics, without understanding what clans are operating there, lost literally millions and even billions of dollars. Clan and regional structures are very strong in India – and in this sense, without being part of these regional structures, it is dangerous to simply bring money there.
– You teach how to look at each country in the Asian region separately, you analyze country specifics. But is China the largest market for Russian business or is there an alternative?
It would be more correct to talk not about an alternative to China, but about a number of opportunities. China is indeed the largest market, but India has a larger population now and this market is more profitable for us. Other factors need to be taken into account – in particular, the product you want to launch.
China, for example, is good at highly integrated manufacturing, where you need to produce everything from the first screw to the car. China has excellent logistics: it is convenient to export everything you need from there to any country in the world, but you pay the corresponding prices for this. China is far from the cheapest country. But you get not only a well-organized market, but also well-organized business processes.
If, for example, we are talking about simpler production, less high-tech products, then Vietnam, Malaysia or Indonesia often produce the same as China, but at significantly lower prices. India is a region within which there are many Indias. And when discussing whether it is good or bad to cooperate with India, you need to understand which state, which tax jurisdiction you will be cooperating with.
Tech startups and financial hubs are Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia. Complex manufacturing, microchips – China and Malaysia. Steel production, ship manufacturing, heavy metallurgy – this is partly China, partly Vietnam. If we are talking about where to supply, say, food products – and Russian food products are very popular – this is China, Indonesia, etc.
Of course, this is not an alternative to China. No other country, or even a combination of countries, can compete with China in the mass of goods. But our entrepreneurs should understand that we do not live by China alone. Often, we have to create complex integrated production: part of the business is in China, part in Russia, and part, for example, in Malaysia.
You need to have a matrix of these countries in your head. We teach that for each type of business, there is, to put it simply, its own country in Asia. Therefore, we need to look at Asia as one big market.
I would also like to remind you that the countries of Southeast and East Asia are most often a free trade zone, a single tax-free zone, so it does not matter where you produce your products. For example, there is a small Russian liqueur production facility. Some of the liqueurs are produced in Thailand and the Philippines and supplied to China. It would seem, why not produce everything at once in China? Because it turned out that it is more profitable to make the drink in terms of production, in terms of the original components, not in China, but only to supply it there for sale.
– Russia and China today focus on the development of new technologies, both in education, science and production. Can there be a technology transfer in this area and does it make sense to bring Russian technologies to the Chinese market?
In fact, this is what is very much needed now. Because on the one hand, we have Russian-Chinese trade at different speeds, but it is developing, and last year we reached more than 245 billion dollars in trade turnover, which, it would seem, is not bad. But basically, the trade turnover is formed due to trade in oil, gas, food products, wood, wood processing. That is, as they say, first-stage products.
It is very important for us to deepen the scientific, technical and high-tech component. And this is a big question. On the one hand, we really have brains and technology, on the other hand, China – and not only China, but many other countries – stubbornly do not want to go for what is called institutional cooperation. It is easier for them to invite a Russian specialist, a young guy from a regional research institute to China, give him a good salary, and he will work within the framework of the Chinese system.
The development of institutional partnerships – when products are manufactured both in Russia and in China – is the first thing that needs to be done now. For example, Chinese laboratory equipment and Russian “brains”, and then all this is jointly brought to the market, including the market of third countries.
It is also necessary to clearly understand that everything must be protected by patents and trademark protection. In China, there is a principle that is usually called first to file in English, that is, the first one to fill out the documents. Therefore, even if you have a patent registration in Russia, and you will bring this technology to the Chinese market, someone there can register it for themselves. Then you will not be able to use this patent or your trademark on the Chinese market. Patent protection, protection of technological inventions, secrets is another very important point.
I don’t know of a single case where Russian inventors have managed to bring their technologies to China directly. But it often happens differently. A joint Russian-Chinese enterprise is created, for example, in a high-tech zone, and in a year or two all this is developed to an industrial model, and then Russian and Chinese colleagues jointly bring it to the Chinese market.
We did not invent this. Both Americans and Europeans acted this way in the Chinese market. Therefore, we must abandon all thoughts about being able to single-handedly push through the Chinese market and make a technological transfer, this is almost impossible. The same is true in the opposite direction.
I have not yet seen any real examples of high-tech transfer from China coming to Russia and being implemented. And this is really necessary.
For example, the Chinese auto industry, which is present in Russia today. Behind the Chinese auto industry, no matter how you feel about it, there are huge technological developments. From artificial intelligence to assembly of units. And theoretically, it is more profitable for us not to buy ready-made cars, but to create production on Russian territory, so that Russian engineers, Russian workers, and business process specialists can be trained, so that, ultimately, we can gain some unique technological experience.
So far, as we see, China is not going for this on a large scale. And this is precisely the serious shortcoming. I think there are two reasons for this.
The first reason is that if you can sell the product, why sell the patent, China believes. And in this sense, it is right. And the second point, it seems to me, is that we also lack specialists who could seriously work on the Asian market, specifically in the field of science and technology.
– Alexey Alexandrovich, thank you very much for the conversation. We are confident that the course “Business and Management in a Global Context: China and Asia” will be in demand and will bring real benefits to both ICEF graduates in terms of careers and the country’s economy as a whole.
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