Field Note 11 of 22

Shanghai, China

“Almost every faculty member is educated abroad.”

He is the author of a well-known book on how China's institutions actually function, and a professor at a leading executive business school in Shanghai. I asked him what made the institution work.

His answer was almost matter-of-fact. Nearly every faculty member had trained abroad before joining. The school itself had been co-founded with an international partner, with outside intellectual formation written into its design from the very beginning — not added later as a gesture, but built in as a founding requirement.

It was the same conviction I'd heard in Seoul, arrived at independently, thousands of kilometers away: a country cannot generate the thinking it needs by only drawing on the minds its existing institutions already produced.

Field Note 11