“They get taken to football games and they get taken to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, so we want them to expose them a little bit to what the USA is as well,” she said.
Liu was arrested by the Minneapolis police on an accusation of “criminal sexual conduct” late Friday night and held about 16 hours. A Police Department spokesman says the investigation is ongoing. Joseph Friedberg, Liu’s attorney, said he is confident there will be no criminal charges and that the CEO did nothing wrong.
“He’s not going to get charged with a crime,” Friedberg said Tuesday. “I would bet my license on it.”
Liu is now back at work in his home country, a big source of scholars for American colleges. Though U.S.-China tensions are running high, the University of Minnesota continues to tout its decades-old tradition of welcoming students from the Orient. The college says it was among the first to resume exchanges after the normalization of relations with China in the late 1970s, establishing an office dedicated to maintaining ties in 1979. In 2008, it opened an office in Beijing to support that collaboration.
The “education at Minnesota is as rigorous as that in Harvard,” added Shen, who also attended the Ivy League college.
Foreign graduates and recruitment executives say one deep-seated reason for the recent surge in popularity of overseas academic programs is an urgent need to solve the problems facing a rapidly changing economy: the rich-poor divide, technology development and sustainable growth among them.
“What worked before, everybody knows will not work in the future,” said Ken Qi, a recruitment executive for Spencer Stuart. “The whole economy is under huge pressure to be transformed.”
Such programs -- offered by countless global universities -- are increasingly popular among the executives Qi helps place in top-flight companies. The students run the gamut from internet startup founders to directors at state-owned enterprises, he said. Lower down the corporate ladder, a key attraction is the ability to network: much of China runs on connections.
But the overarching driver may be a hunger to learn how to coax their Chinese companies into a new economic era. The country’s businesses -- especially those in tech -- are increasingly sending their most promising graduates in unprecedented volumes for further study to learn how Western businesses use technology to deal with economic upheaval.
Spearheaded by seasoned academic, table-tennis enthusiast and Chinese citizen Tony Haitao Cui, the Minneapolis doctorate program only produced its inaugural class of graduates in May of this year. A news report posted by Kweichow Moutai showed its executive manager Cai Fangxin getting his certificate from Zaheer, the Carlson School’s dean. Other graduates onstage that day included Chen Jianhua, chairman of Hengli Group Co. and Wu Xiaoli, deputy-director of information for Phoenix Media Investment. All are considered business elite.