All good things must come to an end, as the last day of the Preparatory Seminar is marked by the Joint Friday. Traditionally, all four International Student Projects, Insight China, Focus India, ConnnectUs and exploreAsean are gathering together on this day. This year’s topic of the Joint Friday was fully dedicated to “globalization”.
The Joint Friday was kicked-off by Jean-Pierre Lehmann’s presentation on Globalization – Prospects, transformation and challenges. Jean-Pierre Lehmann (D.Phil, Oxon) was Founder of Evian Group and is Emeritus Professor at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland, where he was appointed to the Chair of International Political Economy.
As explained by Jean-Pierre Lehmann, globalization is the integration of markets through cross-border movement of goods, capital, information, technology and labor. In fact, Globalization is a process. He refers globalization to Nassim Taleb’s term “Black Swans”, which are cataclysmic events with low probability and high impact. Examples are the stock market crash of 1987, the 9/11, or the financial crisis. By no means are black swans inevitably heralds disasters. The fall of the Berlin Wall and Deng Xiaoping’s open door policy can also be denoted as Black Swans. Furthermore he outlined five major revolutions that promoted the globalization process: ICT revolution, global market revolution, Chinese economic revolution, demographic revolution and the climate revolution. With the west turns towards protectionism, and Xi Jiping emphasized the importance of globalization in this year’s World Economic Forum, Jean-Pierre Lehmann is certain that the narrative of 21st century of globalization will be written in Asia.
In the afternoon a panel discussion were held regarding globalization and its current issues moderated by Prof. Michael Jeive. The renowned panelist consisted of: Jean Pierre Lehmann; Dr. Jan Atteslander, Head of Foreign Trade at Economiesuisse; Dr. Rudolph Strahm, former price surveillant and national council; Dr. Kristyna Ters, lecturer at FHNW and research fellow at the Bank for International Settlements. The time was clearly too short to cover this topic more thoroughly, but the discussion gave some great insights for us.
Thereafter, the career Fair was set up and running with numerous companies from different fields. Career planning, leverage the professional network, or CV-Check, the participants made full use of its opportunity. Still require a CV photo? A Photo booth was set up, while pictures were professionally taken by Julien Weiler (PR-Team connectUS).
Last but not least, an aperitif marked the end of this year’s preparatory seminar, accompanied by the alluring sounds from a live piano playing.
Herewith, the Insight China Team would like to thank all speakers, partners, delegates and participants that have been part of this successful week. This year’s Preparatory Seminar would not have been possible without you, 谢谢你!
And Next Stop… China!
