Chinese officials are rushing to pull out of executive MBAs after Xi Jinping’s government banned them from accepting scholarships as part of a widening anti-corruption campaign.

The government has barred “leading cadres” in the Communist party, the government and state-owned enterprises from signing up for costly business training unless they have official approval and pay full fees themselves. Those on such programmes must quit immediately.

The war on graft has become Mr Xi’s signature policy since coming to power in 2012. The latest move arises from concerns that such elite management training is a hotbed for networking and that these guanxi – connections – are prone to corruption, bribery and rent-seeking.

Blow to schools

The decree will be a blow to China’s booming business schools, where the cost of such MBAs can be more than Rmb600,000 (€75,000).

In some schools, officials were offered virtually free enrolment to attract wealthy entrepreneurs seeking to build networks.

Between 5 per cent and 8 per cent of China’s EMBA students are officials, most of them on business school-funded scholarships. Among those who have taken EMBA degrees in the past are technocrats such as Huang Qifan, mayor of Chongqing, China’s largest city, where Bo Xilai, the disgraced politician was party chief; and Du Jiahao, governor of Hunan province.

Warning

Liu Ji, honorary president of business school Ceibs and a former senior official, warned that the policy could force out up to a third of EMBA students, and would not serve China’s economic interests and market liberalisation.

“You may find individual cases of corruption within the EMBA community but we mustn’t let a rat’s dropping spoil a whole cauldron of soup,” he said.

“In the past months, dozens of ministerial ranking officials have been dismissed. Few of them studied EMBAs but almost all attended the Central Party School [the elite training centre for senior officials]. Are we supposed to close down the Party School?”

Three leading business schools told the Financial Times that many students from the party and government bodies had in recent weeks been quitting their studies or turning down scholarships to protect themselves from the anti- corruption campaign. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2014