It is hardly controversial to observe that the Chinese approach to education is fundamentally different from that of the West.

The Chinese collectivist culture favours learning en masse. There are stadium-sized gatherings to learn English. Research last year by the University of Florida indicated that 86 per cent of students prefer an “organised” learning style with orderly classrooms, a set routine and firm standards of behaviour.

Equally, uncontroversial is the Chinese appetite for education. In The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson reveals that there are more people learning English in China than the population of the United States.

The world’s business schools are increasingly the beneficiaries of the Chinese thirst for learning, with native Mandarin speakers accounting for 5 per cent of the MBA intake at Insead.

Increasing numbers of Chinese MBA students are part of the globalisation of MBA programmes. Insead’s first MBA course featured 52 participants from 14 countries. Now, its one-year full-time MBA has 887 participants, representing 73 countries.

Oxford’s Said Business School has 41 nationalities on its MBA programme, with 49 per cent from Asia. Out of 781 MBA students at the Henley Management College this year, the majority are from outside the UK: 39 per cent are from Europe and 29 per cent from the rest of the world.

The laggards in the international make-up of MBA programmes are American schools. Of Harvard Business School’s MBA enrolment of 907 students, only 38 per cent is from outside America; 11 per cent from Europe; with a mere 1 per cent from Africa.

The globalisation of MBA classrooms raises a number of issues, the most obvious being the challenge posed by different learning styles. Chinese and other Asian students are comparatively quiet in class; unwilling to become involved in classroom discussions. They prefer to be instructed in black and white rather than exploring grey areas.

In contrast, their Western counterparts are keen to become involved in intellectual sparring with the experts. One European academic confided that lecturing at Harvard became much easier when he realised that the teacher’s role was largely to set up the debate then sit back and allow the students to voice their opinions.

There are 12 different nationalities on the full-time MBA programme at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School.

“This not only makes for a better learning experience but is also a condition of AMBA accreditation,” says Dr Patricia Rees, the MBA director. “Graduates indicate that working with students from all over the world was a rich experience.”

Professor David Sims, associate dean for MBA programmes at Cass Business School, says that teaching students of many nationalities is “not problematic”.

He adds: “To prepare for a genuinely global business environment students from all cultures need to learn how to bring the best out of one another. Real common ground is something that people create by working together, by building a shared goal and achieving it.”

MBA programmes increasingly are test-beds for the realities of managing in a global economy. In some ways they have become the ultimate global management laboratory, where managing differing cultural approaches is a day-to-day challenge.

Reflecting this, the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, which has students from 57 countries on its MBA programme, set up a Centre for Diversity in Global Management. The centre is led by Celia de Anca, the author of Managing Diversity in the Global Organization. It seeks to improve understanding of different cultural approaches to work and learning and to encourage diversity as a competitive advantage.

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