Nine UAB students are headed to China Friday, May 30, for a month of study and cultural enrichment in the fastest growing economy in the world. K.C. Pang, director of China Initiatives and instructor of international business for the UAB School of Business, is leading the trip, a project he began in 2006 so that students could get valuable global experience.

The students will attend classes at Anshan Normal University (ANU) and team with Anshan students to form mock U.S. joint venture companies, representing international partnerships. The teams will write a business plan to set up a Chinese company in the United States. Pang will be teaching the course.

In addition to Pang, UAB faculty taking the trip and teaching at ANU are Bor-Yi Tsay, Ph.D., a professor in the accounting department, who will teach management accounting, and Eric Jack, Ph.D., an associate professor in the management department, who will teach operations management.

The recent earthquake that devastated China’s Sichuan province has not affected plans for the trip, which takes the students more than 1,000 miles away from the earthquake site, Pang said.

Other activities
The students will spend time with the foreign affairs office within the mayor’s office and with Chinese business executives in Birmingham’s Sister City in Anshan in the Liaoning Province to learn how China conducts international business.

The group will take a few trips to other cities, including Cangzhou, and visit two universities, a high school, the mayor’s office and several businesses. Students also will spend time with newspaper editors of a newspaper and see the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City.

Pang is active in working to help Alabama businesses form relationships with Chinese businesses. He hopes his students can learn how to form international business partnerships. In his many years of doing business in China, he said he has noticed that many Chinese university students are familiar with U.S. cultures and language, but in contrast, not many U.S. college students know Chinese cultures and language.

Pang strongly believes in experiential education for today’s international business students. “For the United States to compete effectively with China in this global economy,” he said, “our young people, the future leaders of our country, should know about China.”