6-Day Global Leadership Programme: Beijing to Chengdu

Participants arrive in Beijing and complete a seamless hotel check-in with a welcome kit provided by the camp. This day is for settling into the accommodation and adjusting to the new time zone, with free time for personal arrangement. Bilingual staff are on call 24/7 for any assistance, and professional time zone adjustment support is available to ensure a smooth start to the camp.

Morning — voice, breath and structure
Today is spent on the mechanics of speaking in public, which is a craft before it is a talent. The workshop room is a converted courtyard house in Dongcheng, north of the Forbidden City, where the walls are thick and the acoustics are unhelpful in exactly the way a lecture hall is unhelpful. You start with breath and projection: how far a sentence has to carry without a microphone, how to end a line, and why most speakers lose an audience in the first forty seconds. Then comes structure. Each participant builds a three-minute argument with a claim, two pieces of evidence, one acknowledged counter-argument and a close, and delivers it twice - once to the room, once to a camera, which is the version nobody enjoys.

Late morning — rebuttal and cross-examination
The second block is about listening under pressure. Pairs are given opposing positions on a question with no comfortable answer, and each has to summarise the other side accurately before attacking it - the discipline that separates debate from shouting. Your coach runs timed cross-examination rounds, and the group scores how well each speaker handled an interruption, a hostile premise and a question they could not answer.

Lunch
A restaurant near the Confucius Temple, with northern wheat dishes and a hot soup; the group eats together and the coaches use the hour for informal feedback.

Afternoon — exchange and a friendly debate
In the afternoon you travel to a university campus, arranged through our local education partner, where English-speaking Chinese undergraduates join the group. After a short campus walk the two sides are mixed deliberately, so that every debate team is half local and half visitor. The motion is set on the day - typically something about cities, technology or the environment, so that both sides can argue from their own experience rather than from a briefing sheet. Two rounds are held, with a student panel scoring content, delivery and rebuttal. The specific campus is confirmed before the group departs; we do not publish it in advance because the arrangement is made term by term.

Evening — debrief and dinner
Dinner in the old quarter, then a debrief: each participant names one thing they did well and one habit to drop. The evening closes early; tomorrow is a full sightseeing day and the group is expected to keep speaking English throughout it.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — pairing and preparation
The group is split into mixed teams, each with visiting and local students, and each team is given a topic a week or more before the session so there is time to read: a comparison of two education systems, a question in the discipline you are studying, or a small piece of joint research that can be finished in a morning. Each team has a room, a whiteboard and an hour to agree on a structure, divide the work and rehearse. The role of the visiting students is to contribute and present, not to teach, mark or assess anyone; where a team of school-age students is involved, a teacher from each side is present in the room at all times.

Late morning — presentations and questions
Each team presents for around ten minutes and takes questions, in English, with consecutive interpretation where it is needed. The rules are set out at the start: keep to time, cite what you use, disagree with the argument and not the person, and write your questions down rather than calling out. Faculty or senior students comment briefly on each presentation. Participants receive written feedback from their own teachers afterwards; nothing is graded by the host department, and no certificate of academic achievement is issued. Two habits are enforced on the day and are the reason the session takes a full morning: every claim made on a slide has to name its source, and every team has to state one thing it could not establish, which is the question the audience is instructed to ask about.

Lunch
In the canteen with the student partners, which by the second day has stopped being a novelty and started being an ordinary part of the routine.

Afternoon — campus life, led by students
The afternoon is handed over to the local students, who take their visitors through the parts of campus that a formal tour never reaches: the sports ground and the table tennis hall, a club room for calligraphy or traditional instruments, the workshop of a student engineering team, the bike parking outside a lecture hall that has just emptied, the corner of the dormitory block where parcels are collected. Sport is the quickest way in, and most groups end up playing something. The day closes with tea or a cold drink and a discussion of what campus life is actually like, led by the students rather than by staff.

Cultural Insight — the shape of the student year
The academic year runs in two semesters, from early September to mid-January and from late February to early July, with a long winter break around the Spring Festival and a summer vacation long enough for fieldwork, internships or preparation for the postgraduate entrance examination. Undergraduates commonly share a room with four to six classmates, classes are 45 minutes long, and the class group rather than the individual timetable is the basic social unit, with a class adviser responsible for a cohort through its four years. Canteens, clinics, shops and sports facilities on campus mean that a student can live a full week without leaving the gates, which is exactly what many of them do.

Safeguarding and conduct
Participants under 18 stay with their own teachers under a two-adult rule, are never alone with local students or staff, and do not exchange private contact details; group photographs are taken only with the consent of everyone in them and are not published where any person in the frame is a minor without written parental consent.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Beijing.

Morning — over the divide
The flight from Beijing to Chengdu crosses one of the sharpest environmental boundaries in China. North of the Qinling range the country is dry, cold in winter, and organised around wheat and coal; south of it the Sichuan basin is humid, mild, foggy, and organised around rice, bamboo and tea. The Qinling itself is a mountain wall roughly a thousand kilometres long, and it has separated the two regions politically as well as climatically for most of Chinese history - the basin has been an independent kingdom more than once, most famously Shu, and it has been a fallback capital in wartime, including during the Second World War when Chongqing in the same basin held out for eight years.

Early afternoon — arrival in Chengdu
Chengdu is a city of about twenty million people in a municipality and it presents as relaxed, which is not the same thing as quiet. The visible economy of the street is food, tea and retail. Your guide meets the group at the airport and takes everyone to the hotel; after check-in there is time to walk before the afternoon session, and the shape of the next two days is explained: one day of traditional physical culture and team challenges, and one day that closes the programme.

Late afternoon — the old lanes
The Wide and Narrow Alleys quarter, restored and reopened in the early 2000s, is the most legible version of old Chengdu: Qing-dynasty courtyard houses, rebuilt shopfronts, a few working residences kept behind the tourist frontage, and courtyard teahouses where people sit for hours over one cup. The party walks the three parallel lanes and the guide points out what is original and what is reconstruction - an important distinction in a city that has been rebuilt several times, most recently after serious damage in the 2008 earthquake in the surrounding region.

Evening — a Sichuan meal and the next day's brief
Dinner is Sichuan food, ordered at a level of heat the group can actually eat, with the guide explaining the difference between the burning heat of chilli and the numbing effect of Sichuan pepper, which is what makes the cuisine distinctive. Over dinner the teams for tomorrow's challenges are drawn and the rules are explained: mixed teams, points for cooperation rather than speed, and one station that can only be completed if the whole team finishes together.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
In Chengdu.

Morning — Sichuan martial arts
Sichuan has its own martial tradition. The Emei school, named for the mountain south-west of the basin, is counted among the country's major systems, and it is known for close-range work, short power and a strong emphasis on the internal arts - the same family of practice that produced taiji. The session runs in a training hall with a coach: a warm-up that is longer than most participants expect, stance and footwork, a short form taught in sections, and partner drills with two-step and three-step sequences. The drills matter more than the form. Working with a partner requires the two participants to agree on a pace, and the coach will stop the room whenever one pair is pushing harder than the other.

Late morning — balance and coordination
The second block adds equipment: short sticks for coordination, and a rope-skipping and balance circuit that is harder than it looks and is scored. Teams record their own times, which is the first point in the day where honesty matters more than speed. The coach finishes with a short talk on why traditional training emphasises repetition over variety, which is a lesson the group will use in the afternoon.

Lunch
A light Sichuan lunch, deliberately without heavy chilli: noodles, steamed dumplings, a clear soup and fruit. The afternoon is on the water.

Afternoon — dragon boats on the Jinjiang
Dragon boat racing is a festival sport with a fixed ritual calendar, raced on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month to mark the death of the poet Qu Yuan, and Chengdu has club crews that train on the Jinjiang, the river diverted through the city by the Dujiangyan irrigation system built in the third century BC. The afternoon begins with a safety and technique session on land and then on the water: the stroke, the rate, the role of the steersperson and the drum. Then the crews race. A dragon boat of twenty paddlers is the least forgiving team sport there is - the boat simply does not move if the timing is uneven - which is why it is used here rather than any land-based activity.

Evening — debrief and dinner
The debrief compares the two halves of the day: the drills, where cooperation was one-to-one and quiet, and the boat, where it was collective and loud. Each team is asked who steered, who set the rate, who was listened to and who was not, and whether those roles were chosen or simply assumed. Dinner in the city follows, then the group returns to the hotel for the closing session the next morning.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Chengdu.

Morning — the Closing Debrief
Every session of the week has been followed by a short debrief, and the last one is the longest, because it is the only one with the whole record in front of it. Each team presents what it noted: who set the pace on the wall walk and whether that was the person the group expected, how the boat was called on the Jinjiang, what happened when the orienteering leg required the slowest member to arrive with the group, and where the group's own decision-making slowed it down. The facilitator pushes on the gap between what the team says it values and what its behaviour showed, and the group writes up what it will change on returning.

Late Morning — Departure
Transfer to Chengdu Tianfu International Airport (TFU) or Shuangliu (CTU) for the flight home, or to Chengdu East Railway Station for the high-speed service to Chongqing or Xi'an, with assistance on luggage and check-in.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch included.