Professor Alexey Maslov: “This Course Is Like a Lego Building, It Gives All Essential Bricks for Career Success in Asian World”
- There are currently several courses taught in HSE and its departments on China’s economy and Asian development at large. What makes your course special, Professor Maslov? How does it stand apart from its counterparts?
First, it’s important to note that teaching multiple courses on Asia and its many sides is the right thing to do. One major issue with modern-day education is that the majority of our degree programmes maintain, as they did for many years, the Western focus. This holds true not only for History, Philosophy and Culture, but also for such hands-on disciplines such as Business, Entrepreneurship, and Law.
Historically, our learning trajectories relied on interactions with the Western markets – an essential concept that got rooted in our school teaching and permeates our university programmes. However, now that we are facing the need to step up our cooperation with China and Asia at large, we approach it poorly prepared. The whole philosophy of teaching now needs a thorough revision – the revision that would go beyond the scope of just one course or college. This is what the entire Russian education system is now working on to ensure there are competent sources of future staff.
In this light, the availability of multiple courses, each offering its own perspective, appears even more important. My course is about entrepreneurship and doing business in Asia, and it covers solely the practical aspects. Suppose you are to start a business, big or small, in China or India or somewhere in Southeast Asia. This course will walk you through all stages of the process – from cultural differences to negotiations to partner verification to investing to withdrawal. Alongside with the practical task-solving, the course offers theoretical speculations.
One important element in this course is case analysis of the Russian and the Western companies operating in the Asian markets including China’s. These cases cover both success stories and multibillion-dollar failures, showing where companies went wrong and what helped them thrive.
Another crucial element is the ability to come up with operational recommendations for yourself and your potential employers. Breaking into an Asian market is often a long process. It takes the ability to predict the trends for years, even decades ahead. It may turn out that your business can bring higher profits if started in India or Vietnam, not China.
What makes our course special is its practical perspective. It isn’t like a business school as we know it, although it offers both case analysis and fundamental knowledge. In my course, the practicalities of business and entrepreneurship are taught within the context of the orientalism.
- ICEF is actively implementing a double-degree programme with SWUFE, one of China’s largest universities specializing on finance and business analysis. What do you think is the number one thing for a Russian student who is bound for China to be prepared for? What tips or advice can you give to our SWUFE-bound students?
One thing to know about the Chinese universities is that while being open to cooperation many of them have ideology as an essential part of teaching. It is not uncommon for the Chinese lecturers to expand on Xi Jinping’s ideas, which is undoubtedly important but may not always be expedient for students who come for learn practical skills. So, my advice to all your China-bound students is try to source as much useful information as possible while there. Don’t confine yourself to the curriculum alone.
Second, there are some things about studying in China to be mentally prepared for. At first glance, with high-tech campuses, comfortable dormitories, and responsive educators who speak fluent English, the environment there may look just perfect and a promise of smooth learning. But, as we hear from some of our students, they sometimes feel they get more entertainment than knowledge in the classroom. This makes studying in China distinct from other places: China’s universities put a lot of focus on making the experience comfortable for their international students, sometimes to the detriment of study load.
For this reason, it’s essential to be an active learner. Engage in talks, ask questions, look for opportunities to communicate with Chinese students and entrepreneurs. Chinese education offers many opportunities; the students just need to make good use of them. And overall, studying in China should be viewed more as an opportunity to gain practical knowledge and to network.
One needs to keep in mind that China is a country where the comfort of learning co-exists with strict discipline. Skipping classes is just one of the no-no’s to avoid. What hides behind the Chinese hospitality is pragmatic attitude. There have been many cases of expulsion among the Russian and the Western students from the Chinese universities.
Number three, and I want to emphasise it specially, is that students in China have access to a huge amount of data which for many different reasons is unavailable from Russia.
I mean the access to statistical and business databases allowing for partner verification and more. Make full advantage of this access to become experienced in managing big data. Unlike in Western business schools, where your ties with studies office and sometimes access to the library continue after graduation, the students in China lose it, unfortunately.
And one more important point. If you’re planning to move your career to an Asia country (not necessarily China), it might be expedient to consider doing postgraduate courses there – the universities of Hong Kong or Macau, among other countries, might be a good choice.
- How is your course helpful to our students in terms of career navigation? We often hear people say in student-employer sessions, “we are in need of specialists with Asian expertise”, but that sounds vague and somewhat abstract.
Thirty to forty years ago, Asian studies were mainly the interest with historians, philologists, writers, cultural scientists, and philosophers. That interest continues to this day.
Still, what employers seek in candidates in the first place is practical experience in the field of economics. Your potential employers, and among them the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Economic Development, and large financial and investment corporations, are looking to hire people who are not just fluent in an Asian language or knowledgeable about an Asian culture, but know how to manage projects, make deals, and resolve tricky business situations.
They are looking to hire people who won’t need to be trained on the job, they expect their new hires to generate ideas. Along with larger organizations and corporations, we are in contact with the mid-size businesses that partner Asia for some specific projects. These projects deal with science, education, IT, and artificial intelligence, the latter seeing fast progress in Asia.
Partner verification and building good relations are all part of the career success, but there’s this other thing to keep in mind: no course can teach you the entirety of China or Asia.
There’s a huge body of knowledge to assimilate that spans economics, history, culture, and entrepreneurship in order to become a competent specialist. To this end, we have designed this course to include a lot of useful elements. It’s like a Lego building, it has all essential bricks to build career with. One importnat thing this course is tailored to is early orientation to the market and employers’ needs.
After completing it, the graduates will have a clear vision of where they can start careers and in which capacity.
- This course prepares learners for working on the markets of China and Asia. Hundreds of Russian companies are already there. How prepared do you think the Russian market is for Russia-Asia cooperation?
What we are seeing these days is the rising wave of interest in pursuing Asian studies and particularly China studies. There’s a dozen, if not more, of Asia-focused degree programmes that are taught now in the Russian universities from Moscow to the Far East. But, elaborating a programme is the easiest part. It is far more difficult to get it taught by competent teachers with first-hand knowledge and experience of Asia, who can really make it work.
It won’t suffice for courses of this kind to show economic models or investment methods in action. It’s important that they demonstrate also negotiation techniques and what real-life challenges there are to expect in an Asian country. This is something that can only be taught from experience.
Paradoxical as it may sound, but despite this huge interest in dealing with the Asian businesses there’s no comprehensive textbook on the Asian business culture we can use. Nor is there any solid guideline for starting a business in Asia. In this sense, the Russian market can be described as still emerging, even though its progress has been noticeable.
For this reason, our course classifies as pioneer.
- Am I right saying that ICEF graduates – our finance and economics majors – now enjoy much greater opportunities with regards to Russia-China business prospects? Are we talking about jobs in China or India or do these opportunities imply also joint ventures and projects?
Exactly. But the first thing to focus on is the real-life challenges businesses face there and how they deal with them.
Challenge number one: misunderstandings. Not linguistic ones – the Chinese and the Vietnamese are learnable, even if with extra effort. I mean misunderstandings that get caused by differences in perception. They are the reason why it’s so important to be a good communicator, know things and jokes that are appropriate and inappropriate to tell to Asian partners, know how to handle sensitive situations. Working in Asia is always a challenge and a test for whether you can really handle it.
Challenge number two is building interpersonal relations with people in your company. This is, indeed, very often a big problem because the format and the industries the Chinese businesses are being offered to engage in by their Russian counterparts are often new to them – either because they never took root in China or because of China’s legislation. Similarly, the offers coming from Chinese or Indian businessmen may look to Russians as outside their normal paradigm.
The generation we are looking to train is one which is able to start businesses in Asia and knows how to service those businesses not only financially and economically, but also politically, while also attracting their Asian partners to do projects here in Russia by offering the options that would sound clear and acceptable to Asian companies.
To this end, we sometimes have to start from scratch – the thinking styles of the Chinese, the Indians, and the Vietnamese.
- Could you give a couple of examples illustrating how differences in thinking styles can totally ruin entrepreneurial ventures between Russians and, say, Indians or Chinese?
Just recently a large Russian bio-pharmaceutical company launched its product – a good one, with positive reviews from the Chinese users – into the Chinese market. The company then decided to open its headquarters in Shanghai, one of China’s most expensive and high-tech places, and hired a large staff. But suddenly their maintenance costs ran so high that they made the whole idea of the Shanghai office a non-starter. Because all the incentives the company was promised in the form of lower tax rates, better business environment, and even prefunding by the Chinese side aren’t applicable in Shanghai.
All they had to do was take a look at where in China their business fit the definition of cost-effective. Instead, they spent almost a year re-incorporating in a different tax domicile in a different city, re-negotiating terms, and transferring facilities. It was a serious loss of market for them.
Another Russian company, based in the Far East, repeatedly offered its Chinese partners a site to build a factory on. They expected the Chinese to build a plant and a shopping center there. The thinking behind their proposal was very much in line with current political trends, i.e. re-orientation towards Asia.
The offer would be repeated time and again for nearly two years, but nothing happened until we explained to them that no Chinese investor would go to develop an empty site. China invests in places that already have production up and running.
What China can effect in these circumstances is prefinancing or, if needed, a buy-out, but never, not even in the rarest of cases, will Chinese investors consider starting a production from scratch. Once we made it clear to that Russian company, they started looking for an operating factory to eventually find one, which in early 2025 was used to start a joint venture.
I know examples of the Russian companies that lost millions, even billions of dollars in India because they broke into the local markets completely unaware of the intricacies of India’s caste system, clans, and policies. While favoring the relations with Russia, India operates a markedly strong system of clans and local establishments that can turn out to be commercial hurdles, making it risky for investors to invest without proper integration with those clans and establishments.
- You teach students the perception of Asia through the lens of country-specific features. Speaking of China, does this country stand as Asia’s largest market for the Russian businesses or is there an alternative?
I’d rather use “opportunities” instead of “alternative” when it comes to China. China is, indeed, the largest market, but its population is now outnumbered by India, for which reason we now view India as a more profitable market. In fact, there are more factors to consider, one being the product you are going to launch.
One of China’s strengths is highly integrated manufacturing. Its one-stop factories can furnish everything from bolt to vehicle. Its other strength is perfectly developed logistics with convenient shipping routes to any country in the world. Shipping from China isn’t cheap, and China is no longer a cheap country, but what you get there is robust markets and well-tuned business processes.
When it comes to less sophisticated industries and less technology-intensive products, Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia look more cost-effective options than China. As for India, each of its territories is a state within a state. So, before deciding whether India is the right market for you, spend enough time exploring the state and tax jurisdiction you are looking to be in.
While Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia are ideal for tech startups and finhubs, China and Malaysia are best for microchips and knowledge-intensive manufacturing. Some provinces in China and Vietnam offer good conditions for steel production, shipbuilding, and heavy metal manufacturing. As for food products – the Russian foods enjoy high popularity among the Asian populations – the best markets for them are China and Indonesia, among other countries.
But, again, China is unrivaled. No other country, even several countries taken together, can compare to China in terms of market weight. And yet, man does not live on China alone. That’s what our entrepreneurs should keep in mind. It’s not uncommon for businesses to locate one part of their production facilities in China, another in Russia, and a third one in, say, Malaysia.
Cognitively, the Asian markets should be viewed as an array structure. We tell our students that for each type of business there exists a favourable Asian country and that Asia should be viewed as one big market.
Let me also remind that Southeast Asia and East Asia are home to free trade zones, comprising a tax-free zone, so it doesn’t matter where you locate production. As an example, suppose you are a Russian liquor manufacturer. You make some of your liquors in Thailand and some in Philippines, but you sell them all to China. The question arises, why not produce them all in China? Because Thailand and Philippines offer cheaper manufacturing costs and ingredients. That’s why you make your liquors there and have them sold in China.
- Disruptive technologies have been the focus with both Russian and Chinese manufacturers, researchers, and academics. Does it make sense to bring Russian technologies to China? Can technology transfer even happen?
That’s exactly what both our countries need right now, in fact. The Russia-China trade is picking up. Its speed may vary from sector to sector but last year our volume of trade hit $245 billion, which is a fairly good result, even though its major contributors remain oil, gas, food, timber and woodworking sectors, i.e. the so-called “first-processed products”.
R&D and tech-heavy industries are where we would like to see more progress. However, if we can work on it together is a big question. Russia would be willing to contribute its know-hows and technologies, but China strongly resists what we call institutional partnerships. And so do many other countries. Instead, the Chinese opt to hire somebody from Russia who is young and promising and would be working for the Chinese system in exchange for decent pay.
By institutional partnerships I mean those with manufacturing facilities in both Russia and China. They are a format to be pursued in the first place. To give you an example, a partnership involves a Russian know-how and a Chinese lab. Together they can generate a product that might enter not only local markets, but also third country markets.
And here in this connection arises the importance of patenting. There’s this first-to-file rule in China, according to which your trademark or invention, even if covered by Russian patents, can still be patented in China by someone else. When that’s the case, your chance of benefitting from your patent or trademark is zero in the Chinese market. Patenting inventions and trade secrets is one of the cornerstone issues here.
I do not know a single Russian who has succeeded in getting their invention sold directly to China. A more common way is to sell via a Russia-China venture, when people team up for, say, a technology-intensive product, spend a couple of years developing it into industrial design, and finally get it launched into the Chinese market, together.
America and Europe have gone down that same path before. So, any hope of going it alone should be abandoned as impossible. And the same holds true for the technology transfer from China.
I don’t know of any Chinese technology that has been successfully transferred and implemented here in Russia. But we really need this to happen.
Take, for instance, China’s automotive industry and vehicles it sells in Russia. Whatever they may say about them, the Chinese cars are products of technology-intensive manufacture. From AI to assembly lines, they have achieved a lot. We would’ve been much better off if we could have a similar production here rather than purchase ready-made cars, so that we, too, could train our engineers, shopfloor workers, achieve smooth business operations and unique technology experience.
But, for the time being, China hesitates to share. This puts us at a serious disadvantage and here’s why.
The logic behind China’s thinking is why sell patents when you can sell products. That’s hard to argue with. At the same time, we seem to be lacking expertise and specialists who could seriously work in the Asian market in the field of science and technology.
- Professor Maslov, thank you very much for this talk. We are confident that your course Business and Management in Global Context: China and Asia will benefit our graduates career-wise and play a role in national economy.