\n<\/p>\n
Lan Shili, a former billionaire who founded one of China\u2019s first private airlines, beamed in front of the camera: \u201cWith the Oxford gown, the Oxford badge, and this library card \u2013 once you\u2019ve got this three-piece set and you\u2019re sitting here, don\u2019t you kind of look like an Oxford person?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cMy Oxford life officially begins today,\u201d he declared in a video he shared on the Weibo microblog service in September.<\/p>\n
Nearly a year on, the executive training programme that took him to the prestigious University of Oxford \u2013 and which reportedly cost 1.08 million yuan (US$160,589) per participant \u2013 has sparked a media firestorm in China.<\/p>\n
Some participants complained to the university, as well as the media, that the actual curriculum and experience they received fell far short of the programme\u2019s glossy marketing pitches and called it a scam.<\/p>\n
While such cases were rare in China\u2019s relatively mature executive education market, experts said they underscored a persistent reality: the networking opportunities and prestige offered by the world\u2019s top universities were still a powerful draw for the country\u2019s business elite, especially when global expansion was a common aspiration.<\/p>\n
Dozens of Chinese executives attended the Oxford Global CEO Programme\u2019s modules in the United Kingdom and Germany last September, followed by sessions in Hong Kong and Singapore in December.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\n
Lan Shili, a former billionaire who founded one of China\u2019s first private airlines, beamed in front of the camera: \u201cWith the Oxford gown, the Oxford…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":78715,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2611],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-buzz-headlines","wpcat-2611-id"],"brizy_media":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78714\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/78715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sgbuzz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}