Harvard To Educate Chinese Officials

Sixty mid-level Chinese government officials will take a crash course at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) this summer to learn how to govern China’s rapidly evolving economy.

KSG Dean Joseph S. Nye travelled to Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on Jan. 18 to participate in a ceremony inaugurating the program, along with Chinese government officials and representatives of China’s Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management.

Amway, a multinational corporation that conducts business in China, pledged $1 million to underwrite the cost of the program, which will send Chinese mayors and other mid-level government officials to the Tsinghua University for six weeks, and on to Harvard for another five weeks.

“Given the size and importance of China and the issues it is struggling with during its transition from a centrally-planned to a market-oriented economies as it meets new challenges with accession to the World Trade Organization, training in modern public policy analysis and management is crucial,” wrote Julian Chang, executive director of Asia programs within KSG’s Center for Business and Government, in an e-mail. This center organized Harvard’s participation in the program.

The KSG program represents a new collaboration between the KSG, China’s Tsinghua University and China’s government.

A Chinese government agency approached the KSG with the idea for this program, Chang said.

While the KSG has in the past trained officials from the Ukraine, Russia and China, “this is the first time that a program of such scale has been undertaken, and as far as we are aware this is the largest of its kind in the world,” Chang said.

The KSG will benefit “from increased interaction with officials from China,” Chang said, citing the future potential for comparative research.

Local governments will propose candidates for the program to a committee consisting of two Kennedy School representatives, two Tsinghua representatives and two representatives of China’s State Council. According to Audie Wong, an Amway China vice president, the company has expressed interest in underwriting the program for the next five years, but only donated enough to cover the first summer.

“The [Chinese] central government is very much aware of the fact that governance is no longer only based on knowledge of the needs of its own people, but also on a broad knowledge of the modern world, and of the methods of governance,” Wong wrote in an e-mail.

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.