The story begins in a Beijing lecture hall on a June afternoon. On the 17th, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, CKGSB to its students, opened the doors of its new campus at 125 Guangqumennei Street in the Dongcheng district for the 10th edition of its Economic Symposium, a half-day gathering that has become one of the school’s flagship forums. By the school’s own account, distributed afterward through PR Newswire, the point of the afternoon was to take stock of China’s economic outlook at a moment it describes as “an increasingly fragmented yet interconnected global economy”: geopolitical realignment, supply chains being rewired and technology moving faster than the rules that govern it.
What unfolded first was the neighbourhood conversation. The opening session, titled “China-ASEAN Economic Ties in a Rewired Global Economy”, began with a keynote from Dean Li Haitao, a Yale-trained finance professor who has led the school’s research wing on family business and wealth. He described an economy “increasingly powered by exports and high technology”, and put the weight of his argument on the Global South, which now absorbs more than 45% of Chinese exports and, in his telling, will drive the next phase of growth. “The Global South is a new blue ocean of opportunities for Chinese companies, especially those in manufacturing and technology sectors,” he said. The trade backdrop explains the attention: China and the ASEAN states have been one another’s biggest trading partners for years, with two-way trade passing USD 1 trillion in 2025, while goods flowing between China and the European Union still top 700 billion euros annually.
At its heart, the day carried a single argument about how Chinese firms should now operate abroad. Professor Li Wei, an economist who runs the school’s big-data economic research, launched a Chinese-language report titled “The New Chinese Playbook for Going Global”. Built on fieldwork across Southeast Asia, it contends that the export-goods era is giving way to something heavier: local plants, local brands and local partnerships in the markets themselves. “For companies, globalization isn’t just about taking domestic experience abroad, but about building new, organic business models together with local communities, developing new adaptable capabilities, and helping solve more complex and difficult pain points”, Li Wei told the room.
For those involved, the guest list was the real signal. More than 600 people registered, many of them the China leadership of Fortune 500 companies, with Siemens, Samsung, Abbott, Merck and Rolls-Royce represented. The first panel seated Indonesia’s ambassador Djauhari Oratmangun, who had given his own keynote, alongside Unny Sankar, the economic minister at the Malaysian embassy, Qu Tian of ATM Capital, Xu Longhua of WOOK, and Le Yucheng, a former Chinese ambassador to India and Kazakhstan. The second session, on Europe, was framed around “China-Europe: Risks, Resilience and Opportunity”, with Finland’s ambassador Mikko Kinnunen and Martin Matter of the Swiss embassy in dialogue, moderated by Tao Zhigang, before a corporate panel drawn from BASF, Merck and Shell. The British, European, Indonesian and Swiss chambers of commerce in China supported the event, and the whole programme ran in English and Chinese with simultaneous interpretation.
The stakes reach past the campus gates. The questions the agenda circled, where supply chains settle, how European firms weigh risk against opportunity, what deepening ties across Southeast Asia mean for both sides, are the same ones boardrooms and foreign ministries are arguing over this year. A business school symposium settles none of them; what it offers is a rare public look at how the people making those bets, in Chinese and in English, in the same afternoon, frame the choices.
That framing, in the end, was the finding. A school whose programs run from Silicon Valley to Southeast Asia used its tenth gathering to argue that the bridge is being rebuilt rather than abandoned: trade with ASEAN above a trillion dollars, trade with Europe above 700 billion euros, and a strategy that now runs through Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur as much as through Brussels. For a Beijing afternoon in a still-fragmented world, that is a story with a direction.
Sources
- CKGSB Economic Symposium 2026 Beijing
- CKGSB Hosts 10th Economic Symposium in Beijing, Spotlighting China-ASEAN and China-Europe Economic Ties
