9-Day China Business Immersion: Shanghai & Hangzhou Case Programme

Airport/hotel transfer, luxury business hotel check-in, business district orientation guide distribution, free personal arrangement

Participants arrive in Shanghai and check in to a luxury business hotel located in the central financial district. The day is dedicated to settling in and acclimatizing, with free time for personal exploration. A customized business district orientation guide is provided to help participants navigate the financial hub easily, and camp staff are available for any on-site assistance.

Morning — what a case is, and how to break one
The day begins with the method rather than the content. A case is not a summary of a company's success; it is a decision problem described from the position of the person who had to make it, with too little information, a deadline, and no correct answer at the back of the book. The case for this session is written for the programme and deals with a foreign consumer or industrial brand deciding how to enter the Chinese market: which city or region first, direct or through a distributor, what price point, what product specification, and what it is prepared to lose in year one. Participants receive the material the evening before and are expected to have read it and arrived with a position, which is the entire discipline of the method.

Late morning — group analysis on a fixed structure
Teams of four or five work through a structure that is deliberately rigid, because the first skill is not creativity but order: define the decision to be made; separate what the case states from what has been assumed; size the market and the addressable segment; map the competition and the substitute products; work out the economics (price, contribution margin, cost to serve, payback); set three criteria against which options will be judged; then choose. Participants are asked to write down their assumptions in a separate column, because in the plenary the first question to any team will be which of its numbers is invented. Faculty circulate between teams rather than lecture, which is the point: the classroom is working, not listening.

Lunch
At the venue or a nearby restaurant; the discussion normally does not stop, and in this method it is not supposed to.

Afternoon — plenary critique
Each team presents its recommendation in seven minutes and takes questions from the room. The critique follows the case discussion convention: attack the argument, test the evidence, and ask what would have to be true for the recommendation to fail. Each team is then required to state the one piece of information it would have paid most to have, which converts a classroom exercise into a research brief for the fieldwork day that follows. The session closes with a short statement of the decision that was actually taken in the case, and a discussion of why the answer often satisfies nobody - which is the ordinary condition of management.

Cultural Insight — why the case method travels badly
The case method was developed for classrooms where disagreeing with the instructor in public is normal, participation is assessed, and there is no single authority in the room. Imported into a setting where students are used to lectures and to one correct answer, it needs deliberate scaffolding: written positions prepared before the session, fixed time slots so that nobody is talked over, and an explicit rule that the instructor will not resolve the discussion. The session is run that way on purpose, and the difference in how quickly a group becomes willing to argue is one of the more interesting things to watch over a week.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — China's Economy & Global Role Lecture
Listen to a special lecture by a renowned economist on China's economic development and its role in the global economy, including an in-depth explanation of the Belt and Road Initiative.

Afternoon — The Bund & Financial Institutions
Take a scenic walk along the Bund, Shanghai's historic waterfront lined with 52 buildings in varied international architectural styles from the concession era, with commentary on international finance. Then visit the Shanghai Stock Exchange — established in 1990 — or the China Financial Museum for insider insights into China's capital markets.

Evening — At Your Leisure
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure.

Morning — method and ethics briefing
Fieldwork is only as good as the instrument, so the morning is spent building it. Teams agree on what they will record before they go out: for a store audit, the product specification, the package size, the shelf price, the position on the shelf (eye level, top, bottom), the number of facings, the promotional mechanic and the expiry or production date where it applies. The sample is fixed in advance - a set number of store types rather than whichever shops happen to be convenient, because convenience sampling is the single most common flaw in student research and produces confident nonsense. The ethics are stated plainly and apply to every team: interviews are voluntary, short and explained at the start; no one is recorded or photographed without permission; no names, phone numbers or other personal information are collected or kept; and no interview continues after a person has declined.

Late morning — on the street
Teams work in pairs, since nobody interviews alone, and cover an assigned stretch of a Shanghai shopping district: a department store, a convenience chain, a supermarket, a pharmacy or a specialist shop, plus the street itself, where most of the small retail in any Chinese city actually happens. A price ladder emerges quickly, because the same product will appear at four price points within a few hundred metres. Counting is the other half of the work: the categories on promotion, the number of facings given to a local brand against an imported one, the shelf talkers and the digital signage, and the queueing behaviour at the payment counters, where almost everyone pays by phone.

Lunch
A quick lunch near the fieldwork area; notes are typed up over the table, because a detail that is not written down within the hour is usually lost.

Afternoon — interviews, entry and first analysis
Back at the venue, teams enter their audits into a shared sheet and start the arithmetic: mean and range of the observed prices, promotional incidence by category, the price differential between imported and domestic equivalents. Interview notes are summarised by theme rather than quoted at length, since the sample is small and the honest output of six conversations is a set of hypotheses, not a market share. The day closes with each team presenting three findings and one methodological flaw in its own work - the flaw being compulsory, and usually the most useful item on the slide.

Cultural Insight — reading Chinese retail
Chinese cities concentrate retail into mixed-use complexes that combine shopping, restaurants, entertainment, education and medical services in one building, because the mall took over the social function that the street and the department store split between them elsewhere. Alongside them runs the largest e-commerce market in the world: online sales have been running at roughly a quarter of total retail sales of consumer goods in recent years, with short-video and livestream selling growing fastest. The practical consequence for anyone doing a store audit here is that the shelf is no longer where most of the volume is, and a survey that ignores the phone screens in front of you will misread the market.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — City God Temple & Yu Garden
Start in the Old Town at the City God Temple (Chenghuangmiao) to experience traditional religious culture, then wander the market for handicrafts and snacks. Enter Yu Garden to appreciate delicate Jiangnan garden architecture, including the Nine-Zigzag Bridge and Huxin Pavilion.

Afternoon — Xintiandi
Enjoy a traditional Shanghainese lunch, then visit Xintiandi, exploring preserved shikumen lane houses blended with modern shops and galleries. Visit the Site of the First National Congress of the CPC to learn modern history, and stroll the pedestrian streets experiencing old and new Shanghai.

Evening (Optional) — Xintiandi Dining
Dine at a trendy Xintiandi restaurant (not included) and enjoy the restored historic district's evening ambiance.

Morning — transfer and orientation
The group travels by high-speed rail from Shanghai to Hangzhou, a run of roughly 45 to 60 minutes on a line that carries more than a hundred services a day. Zhejiang province, of which Hangzhou is the capital, is the clearest example in China of growth driven by private firms rather than state enterprise: the small workshops that appeared in the 1980s under the collective label of township and village enterprises became private manufacturers, then exporters, then brands, and then platforms. The morning briefing sets out what the group is going to look at and why an operations visit is different from a site tour: you are there to watch material and information move, not to admire the building.

Late morning — the visit
The visit is arranged through our local partner, and the specific company, the access conditions and the agenda are confirmed before you travel; requests can be declined, and production schedules and confidentiality rules sometimes change the programme at short notice. What is normally possible is a walk along a defined route through a plant, warehouse or fulfilment centre, with the safety requirements of the host enforced without exception: closed shoes, high-visibility vest, no loose clothing near machinery, stay behind the marked line, no photography in production or storage areas, no recording anywhere, and nothing taken from the site, including documents left on a desk. What participants should be watching is unglamorous and revealing - the physical layout and how far a product travels inside the building, the size of the buffer between stages, the number of quality checks and where they sit, the boards by each line showing the day's target, and the number of people standing still.

Lunch
In the company canteen where the host offers it, which is the fastest way to see the shape of a shift; otherwise a restaurant nearby.

Afternoon — briefing and questions
Questions are submitted in writing the day before, which is both courteous and practical, and the afternoon session works through them with operational staff: how demand is forecast, how much of the range is made to stock and how much to order, what the minimum order quantity is for a new customer, how returns are handled, what happens when a supplier misses a delivery, and how the business decides between selling domestically and exporting. Participants then spend forty minutes consolidating their notes into a one-page operations description in the same structure used by the case method: what the process is, where the constraint sits, and what the numbers suggest. Nothing said in the room is attributed to the company outside it, and no material provided may be reproduced.

Cultural Insight — the Yangtze delta as one workshop
Hangzhou sits at the southern end of a manufacturing region where, within a few hours by road, you can find textiles, injection moulding, electronics assembly, small appliances and packaging. That density is the real competitive advantage: a new product can be prototyped, tooled, produced and packed without leaving the delta, and a factory can be small and still serve export markets because the components and the logistics already exist around it. It is also why an operations visit here tends to be more instructive than a visit to a famous headquarters - the ordinary firm in the ordinary industrial park is where the margin is actually made.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Hangzhou.

Morning — Longjing Tea Village
Travel to Longjing Village, the birthplace of China's famed Dragon Well (Longjing) green tea cultivated for over 1,200 years. Tour terraced tea fields, join a seasonal tea-picking session, and take part in a traditional tea ceremony. Savor the nutty aroma of freshly brewed tea with local sweet osmanthus cakes.

Afternoon — Hefang Street & Xixi Wetland
Stroll Hefang Street, a restored Song-dynasty-style pedestrian lane of silk shops, traditional pharmacies, and stalls selling Hangzhou fans and bamboo scrolls; taste beggar's chicken or Dongpo pork. If time permits, take a late boat ride through Xixi Wetland, a tranquil network of waterways and heron habitats.

Evening — Flexible Evening
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Hangzhou.

Morning — structure before prose
A written case analysis is not an essay and not a report; it is an argument addressed to a decision-maker who has ten minutes. The morning sets the structure the teams will use: the decision and who owns it; the evidence, separated into what was observed, what was said in an interview, and what was assumed; the options with their consequences; the criteria, stated before the options are scored; the recommendation; the risks and the first three things to do if it is approved. The facilitator's insistence is on the separation of evidence types, because a set of six interviews and a store audit cannot be blended into a single confident paragraph without misleading the reader about how much is known.

Late morning — writing against the clock
Teams draft in the room, two pages of analysis plus one page of exhibits, with the exhibits built from their own fieldwork: the price ladder, the promotional counts, the process description from the company visit, the criteria table. Numbers are labelled with their source and their limits - the number of stores audited, the district, the date, the fact that a sample of six shoppers is not a sample of a city. Where a figure comes from a public statistic rather than from the week's work, it is marked as such. Drafts are reviewed by the facilitator every forty minutes, which keeps the exercise from drifting into decoration.

Lunch
At the venue, with the afternoon's presentations already circulating in draft.

Afternoon — dry run and hostile questions
Each team presents to two other teams, who have one job: find the weakest claim and ask about it. The audience is given the team's evidence table in advance so that the questions can be specific rather than general, and the presenting team is not allowed to answer with a number it did not bring. Teams then have an hour to revise before the following morning's final session, which is the only part of the exercise that is actually assessed by anyone - and even there, what is assessed is the quality of the reasoning, not whether the recommendation is the one the facilitator would have made.

Cultural Insight — where an argument is allowed to land
Working across a language and a business culture, the failure mode is rarely the analysis; it is the delivery. A recommendation that is presented as a conclusion with no room for discussion can close a room that would have engaged with the same content framed as a proposal, and a team that never concedes a weakness is not read as confident but as unpersuasive. The dry run exists to rehearse the two habits that travel best in either direction: state the assumption, and name the limitation before somebody else does.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Hangzhou.

Morning — final presentations
Each team presents for twelve minutes to a panel made up of the programme facilitator and, where available, a local academic or a manager who has taken part in the week, followed by eight minutes of questions. The panel is given the written analyses in advance and is asked to press on two things only: whether the evidence supports the recommendation, and whether the team has understood the constraint it is working inside. Feedback is written and returned before departure. The panel does not rank the teams, and no marks are issued. Where a team's recommendation turns on a number it produced itself, the panel is instructed to ask what the sample was and when it was collected, because the difference between a finding and an impression is almost always the sampling frame.

Late morning — closing session
The closing session reviews what was covered - the case method, the fieldwork, the company visit, the analysis - and collects the participants' own written evaluation, which is read by the programme team and used to change the next run. Closing remarks are deliberately short. It is worth stating the status of the programme plainly at this point: it is a short executive-style immersion, it does not carry academic credit, and it leads to no qualification, internship, offer or reference unless a separate arrangement has been made in writing with a host institution. What participants leave with is a set of notes, a written case analysis and a contact list held through the programme office.

Lunch
A farewell lunch, and the last chance to go back through the week's exhibits with the facilitator.

Afternoon — departure
Transfer to Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport for domestic and international flights, or to Hangzhou East railway station, from which high-speed services reach Shanghai in under an hour and Beijing in roughly four and a half hours. Your guide confirms the terminal or platform, the check-in deadline and the luggage arrangements in advance. Written analyses, evidence tables and field notes travel home with participants; nothing provided by the company visited is reproduced or circulated, and no notes naming its staff or its figures leave the group. Allow two and a half hours before an international departure from Xiaoshan and forty minutes before a high-speed train, since the security and ticket checks at Hangzhou East are strict.

Cultural Insight — what nine days in a market can change
Nobody returns from a week and a half with a business plan for China, and anyone who says otherwise has not done the numbers. What changes is the resolution of the picture: prices on a shelf in a Shanghai district, a queue paying by phone, a production line with a target board beside it, and a manager explaining why the minimum order quantity is what it is. Those are the details that make a strategy document either credible or obviously written from a desk, and the difference is usually visible within the first paragraph.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Day ends on departure - no hotel night included.