About CKGSB Knowledge

CKGSB Knowledge

CKGSB Knowledge is the English-language business magazine of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, known as CKGSB, in Beijing. It publishes business and economic analysis drawn from the school's faculty, together with case studies, interviews and reporting on Chinese companies, entrepreneurship and management, for an international readership of executives, alumni and others who need to understand business in China in English. Where a conventional university magazine reports mainly on its own institution, CKGSB Knowledge was built as a publication about China itself: its companies, its consumers, its technology, its economic policy and its place in the global economy, explained by the professors and practitioners of a school whose founding purpose was to generate exactly that kind of China insight.

The magazine's own pages make its scale clear. By June 2013 it had reached volume number 10, then still titled CKGSB Magazine. As CKGSB Knowledge it reached volume 31 in fall 2018, volume 32 in winter 2018, volume 35 in fall 2019, volume 38 in summer 2020, volume 43 in March 2022, volume 48 in August 2023, volume 49 in December 2023 and volume 51 in August 2024. It has carried a cover price of $12.00 and the ISSN 2312-9905, and issues have run to around seventy pages, ending characteristically with China Data and a Bookshelf section.

The school behind the magazine

The Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business was established in Beijing on 21 November 2002, through the financial support of the Li Ka Shing Foundation. It takes its name from Cheung Kong, the Hong Kong conglomerate built by Li Ka-shing. The school describes itself as China's first privately funded, research-driven business school, and as China's first faculty-governed, independent and private business school. Its founding dean is Xiang Bing, professor of China business and globalization, who previously pioneered the Executive MBA programme at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management and was one of the founding members of the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

CKGSB is headquartered in Beijing, with campuses in Shanghai and Shenzhen and representative offices in New York, London and Hong Kong. It offers MBA, Finance MBA and Executive MBA programmes, a Business Scholars Program and short-term executive education. That structure explains the magazine's audience. The school teaches senior Chinese executives at home and markets China-focused education to global executives abroad, and it opened a London office in 2011, describing itself then as the first Chinese business school to open a branch in London. An English-language magazine is the natural print and digital bridge between those two audiences.

What the magazine sets out to do

The school's own description of the publication is precise. CKGSB Knowledge is an English-language publication which provides business and economic analysis from the business school's faculty. It focuses on China-specific business trends, while also providing coverage of emerging markets in the global business landscape. Its topics are subdivided into Policy and Law, Economy, Management, Technology, Manufacturing and Society, with subjects ranging from joint ventures to sustainability.

That remit distinguishes it from both a newspaper and an alumni bulletin. A newspaper must cover the day's events whether or not it has special expertise in them. An alumni bulletin must privilege institutional news. CKGSB Knowledge could instead select the questions on which a research faculty claimed distinctive knowledge, China-specific trends, company behaviour and management practice, and treat them at magazine length. Its editorial promise, repeated across the school's materials, is unrivalled China insight: not simply news from China, but interpretation of China by people based there and studying it full time.

How an issue is built

A typical issue, as shown by the published tables of contents, opens with a letter from the editor and commentary, then moves to a cover story and themed features, and closes with regular data and reading sections. The December 2023 issue, volume 49, contained a cover story, a Business Barometer presenting the school's Business Conditions Index, China Data at page 68 and Bookshelf at page 70. The August 2024 issue, volume 51, titled Push and Pull on its cover, about China's research output on cutting-edge technologies, followed the same architecture, with sections including Doing Business and the Business Barometer, and contributions in which authors discussed state-owned enterprises, credit, spending and the rural-urban divide.

The regular elements are part of the magazine's identity. Business Barometer turns the school's survey research into a recurring feature rather than a one-off report. China Data supplies a standard statistical closing section. Bookshelf, in which figures such as a senior research analyst select notable China books, gives the executive reader a guided reading list. Snapshot and interview formats provide shorter entry points alongside long analysis. The masthead in published issues lists the publisher as CKGSB Global Limited in Hong Kong, production by SinoMedia, and an editorial contact address at the school, ckgsb.knowledge@ckgsb.edu.cn, inviting letters to the editor and reprint requests. In the December 2023 issue Zhou Li was named as editor-in-chief of CKGSB Knowledge.

The Business Conditions Index and the Case Center

Two research operations feed the magazine with material few general publications can generate themselves. The first is the CKGSB Business Conditions Index, or BCI. In June 2011 the school's Case Research Department and its Big Data Economic Research Department initiated a project to gauge the business sentiment of executives about the macroeconomic environment in China. The survey was designed and tested in July 2011 under the direction of Professor Li Wei, and monthly reporting followed from May 2012. The BCI is a set of forward-looking diffusion indices using the same methodology as the purchasing managers' index: 50 is the threshold, a value above 50 indicates the measured variable is expected to increase, and a value below 50 indicates it is expected to fall. Its four sub-indices cover corporate sales, corporate profits, the corporate financing environment and inventory levels, with further measures of labour and total costs, prices, investment and recruitment.

For the magazine, the value of the BCI is continuity. When CKGSB Knowledge reported in May 2023 that the index had registered 55.0, sliding from April's 58.8 but remaining above the confidence threshold, it was not citing an outside poll. It was publishing its own school's longitudinal evidence about what Chinese executives expected to happen to their sales, profits and financing. The second feeder is the case operation: a school that researches Chinese companies for teaching cases has a standing supply of company stories, founder interviews and management problems that can be adapted into magazine case studies, which is central to the publication described in this profile.

Issues and themes

The cover lines of successive issues give a reliable map of the magazine's concerns. Winter 2018, volume 32, asked what growing tensions with the United States meant for China's future, carried Stephen S. Roach on the codependency of the United States and China, and Shen Jianguang's economic forecasts for 2019. Fall 2018, volume 31, led on the tourism deficit, carried Kishore Mahbubani on the future of US-China relations, and reported on the robot revolution sweeping through China's e-commerce supply chain. Fall 2019, volume 35, under the heading Widening Cracks, examined whether China and the United States were decoupling and asked who owns the data. Summer 2020, volume 38, titled Facing Down the Virus, asked how East Asian nations had effectively flattened the curve and carried Yuen Yuen Ang on how corruption in China has evolved.

Later issues continued the pattern of joining a large economic question to company-level reporting. March 2022, volume 43, was titled Thinking ESG, as Chinese markets turned increasingly toward environmental, social and governance conscious investment, and included pieces on digital doctors, fertility and education. August 2023, volume 48, titled Working in Harmony, reported that China was turning towards more equitable commercial partnerships in Southeast Asia as decoupling from the West grew, and carried research led by Professor Sun Tianshu on how susceptible particular job roles are to change with the implementation of artificial intelligence. December 2023 examined how large Chinese companies had rapidly adopted artificial intelligence while smaller firms lagged, whether China was likely to repeat Japan's lost decades, and the growth in international use of the yuan.

Interviews and outside voices

Although faculty analysis is its foundation, the magazine has never been a house journal written only by professors. Its pages mix CKGSB faculty with external practitioners and commentators: chief executives discussing changes in their industries, authors presenting new books, economists from banks and research firms, and public intellectuals debating China's relations with the United States and the rest of Asia. That mixture is deliberate for its intended reader. A senior executive or alumnus reading in London, New York or Hong Kong does not need a summary of a lecture. The magazine offers a conversation in print between the school's researchers and the people running companies, funds and institutions in and about China.

The school's wider alumni network supplies both subjects and readers. CKGSB has long pointed to alumni including Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, Shi Yuzhu, chairman of Giant Interactive, Li Dongsheng, chairman of electronics company TCL, and Fu Chengyu, chairman of Sinopec. A publication read by and writing about leaders at that level operates in a different register from ordinary campus media: its interviews and case studies are also a record of how a generation of Chinese private-sector and state-sector leaders explained their own decisions.

Readership and place among China business publications

CKGSB Knowledge serves an international executive and alumni readership that needs China explained in English, at depth, without assuming either insider knowledge of Chinese politics or a beginner's knowledge of business. It competes for that reader's attention not with Chinese-language business magazines, but with the Asia editions of global business titles and with the publications of other business schools. Its advantage is institutional: a Beijing-headquartered school, with campuses in Shanghai and Shenzhen, that was the first business school in China to incorporate the humanities into its core business curriculum, in 2005, and that set up an EMBA philanthropy scholarship in 2002. The magazine's range, from data ownership and artificial intelligence to fertility, education and sustainability, reflects that broader definition of what a business leader should understand.

Its website extends the same model beyond print. The CKGSB Knowledge site publishes articles, the BCI and related research in English, allowing a feature written for a quarterly-style print issue to continue as searchable reference material for executives considering investment, partnership or study in China. Print gives the school a curated statement of what matters now; the site gives that statement permanence and reach.

Why the magazine matters

CKGSB Knowledge matters because of the position of its publisher. CKGSB was created in 2002, at the moment China's private sector was becoming a central force in the economy, with a mission, in the school's words, to cultivate transformative business leaders with a global vision, social responsibility, an innovative mindset and the ability to lead with empathy and compassion. A school making that claim needs a public voice in the language of global business. The magazine is that voice in long form.

Read across its volumes, from the CKGSB Magazine of 2013 to the CKGSB Knowledge issues of 2023 and 2024, the publication traces two decades of questions that defined Chinese business: joint ventures and sustainability at the outset of its described remit; United States-China tension, decoupling and supply chains in the late 2010s; pandemic response in 2020; ESG in 2022; and artificial intelligence, demographics and the international yuan by 2023 and 2024. For a media directory, it is therefore best classified not as a general news magazine but as a business school's English-language magazine of record on Chinese companies, entrepreneurship and management, published from Beijing for the executives and alumni, in China and abroad, whose decisions its faculty seek to inform.