ZUFE has officially joined the international higher education alliance, as confirmed by the Board of Directors of the Central and East European Management Development Association (CEEMAN). This marks ZUFE as the seventh domestic institution to join the consortium, following such as Zhejiang University, University of Science and Technology of China, and Xi’an Jiaotong University. This is also the first time ZUFE has joined a global alliance initiated by an international organization.
President Wei Jiang presents a souvenir from ZUFE to Danica Purg, the founding chair of the CEEMAN.
Zhang Lei, the associate dean of the School of Management, accepts the Certificate of Membership on behalf of ZUFE.
Founded in 1993, CEEMAN initially focused on accelerating the development of management education in Central and Eastern Europe. Over the past 30 years, it has expanded to over 200 member universities in more than 50 countries across Europe, North America, Asia, South America, and Africa, with over a half of members from “the Belt and Road Initiative countries”, establishing CEEMAN as a globally influential management association. ZUFE joined CEEMAN in 2024. The annual conference was held in Innsbruck, Austria from September 25 to 28, with nearly 200 representatives from more than 50 universities around the world.
During the conference, President Wei Jiang was invited to deliver a keynote speech titled “Entrepreneurship Education and Revitalization of Rural Areas of ZUFE”. Drawing on the mission of entrepreneurship education, he introduced a social entrepreneurship education model focused on revitalization of rural areas to the world. He elaborated on the remarkable contributions of ZUFE’s entrepreneurship education in serving rural development and advancing common prosperity, which had been commended twice by Premier Li Qiang. Wei emphasized ZUFE’s efforts to address the challenges of revitalization of rural areas and the shortage of entrepreneurial talents by developing an innovation and entrepreneurship education system guided by the NEF (New Finance and Economics) strategy, with emphasis on literacy, practical experience, stratified classification, and deep integration, attracting innovation and entrepreneurship talents from domestic universities and fostering a two-way entrepreneurial dynamic between rural areas and young people.
Wei Jiang further detailed the College Student Rural Revitalization Competition initiated and established by ZUFE. He proposed a closed-loop system for serving revitalization of rural areas emphasizing “real work, countryside-generated questions, university-generated answers, and facilitating implementation”. He also elaborated on ZUFE’s “platform+project” social entrepreneurship model and operational system for revitalization of rural areas to international organizations.
President Wei Jiang delivers a keynote speech.
Wei Jiang stressed that over the past seven years, more than 600 colleges and universities across China, with over 25,800 teams and nearly 178,000 college students, have actively engaged in rural areas to support agricultural development, increase farmers’ incomes, and contribute to revitalization of rural areas. This initiative has yielded over 25,800 entrepreneurial proposals and successfully implemented more than 2,000 projects, including transformation of rural space, cultural and creative design, and the inheritance of intangible cultural heritage. These projects have served over 4,300 rural communities and garnered more than 10 provincial and ministerial-level projects and bases. At present, the competition has been formally integrated into the “Youth Challenge Innovation”system by the China Foundation for Youth Entrepreneurship and Employment of the China Communist Youth League.
The content of the speech received high praise from domestic and international experts and scholars attending the conference. Danica Purg, the founding chair of CEEMAN, and Antonio Freitas, a member of CEEMAN Committee and the president of São Paulo School of Business Administration in Brazil, highly commended ZUFE’s efforts and achievements in innovation, entrepreneurship, and revitalization of rural areas, praising ZUFE as “a university with an entrepreneurship spirit.”
Looking forward, ZUFE plans to actively foster academic exchanges and collaborations with CEEMAN member institutions, engages in global education governance, and initiates international quality accreditation (IQA), thereby enhancing the international standing of its disciplines.
The heads of the School of Management and the International Office accompanied ZUFE delegation to the annual meeting.
