吉 刘
Liu was born in Anqing, Anhui Province. When his father moved inland to Chongqing during the Sino-Japanese War, Liu was raised by his mother, a teacher who believed in knowledge and was strict with her children. From early childhood, Liu was an avid reader with a wide range of interests.
He attended several middle schools in the Yangtze Delta, notably Hangzhou Middle School with its glorious revolutionary and cultural traditions. Liu still remembers his teachers there, noting that they played a crucial role in the shaping of his outlook on the world and on life. He graduated from the Power Mechanical Engineering Department at Tsinghua University in 1958.
Liu joined the Ministry of Electro-Mechanics, starting as an assistant engineer and rising to director. For his first job, he was among the first batch of engineers dispatched to the Shanghai Internal Combustion Engine Research Institute. By 1964 he had already reached the official rank of engineer. Just as he was feeling proud of living up to the expectations of the Party and his country, the Cultural Revolution broke out. From 1966 he was ‘under control’ and sent to a factory for labor reform. Workers there cared for him and let him read secretly in the changing room. With no access to technical books, he memorized the four great books by Chairman Mao, then Lenin’s complete works as well as Marx and Engels’ anthologies. His surreptitious reading had made him a Marxist scholar. As soon as the Cultural Revolution ended, Liu regained his freedom, made friends with research fellows of natural dialectics, and began his research on the social sciences.
In 1979 Liu became a research fellow and later deputy director at the Shanghai Scientific Research Institute. From 1983 to 1987, Liu was executive chairman of the Association of Science and Technology of the Shanghai Municipality. Collaboration with other similarly minded colleagues resulted in the foundation of leadership science, a discipline new to China. In concert with China’s policy of reform and opening up, Liu was committed to research on economic development strategies and economic restructuring. His research gained wide attention and recognition, resulting in his appointments to leadership roles as deputy director of the publicity department of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, director of the Commission for Economic Restructuring under the Shanghai municipal government and vice president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
While working in the publicity department, Liu initiated and hosted the now-famous ‘Bimonthly Seminar’ to which intellectuals from all fields in Shanghai were invited to air their views and share insights with municipal officials. One result of this seminar was the idea of joint-stock enterprises, a controversial issue in the early 1990s. The Shanghai municipal government eventually decided to experiment with a joint-stock system that has proven to be correct and timely. Later, in regard to the development of Chinese enterprises in the context of globalization, Liu suggested that Chinese entrepreneurs should embrace the concept of global thinking. This profound interest in globalization and the development of Chinese enterprises led to his appointment as honorary chair- man of the China Mergers & Acquisitions Association (CMAA), an organization that promotes the globalization of Chinese enterprises.
In 2000, Liu became executive president of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. Established as a joint venture between the European Union and the People’s Republic of China in November 1994, CEIBS is now home to the top-ranked MBA and EMBA programs in Asia, and is the first MBA/EMBA school to receive EQUIS Accreditation through the European Foundation for Management Development. Through his work at CEIBS Liu has become a champion of entrepreneurship within Chinese organizations.
The CEIBS mission is the education of managers for China to an international standard. Liu cautions that it is not enough for the school simply to transmit management knowledge and skills. He advocates a CEIBS culture that includes a humanitarian spirit, philosophic thinking, rich knowledge and broad vision. Liu defines his motto for CEIBS in three words: conscientiousness, innovation, and excellence. According to Liu: ‘. . . without proper cultural tutelage, entrepreneurs or senior managers of the 21st century would be merely part of a vulgar money-making machine’ (The Link, 2006). With his enthusiastic support, CEIBS regularly hosts a variety of cultural seminars and conferences.
