Working on China as an academic makes you go back to Socrates – with every new page you turn, you feel more and more that “now I know that I don’t know anything.” Teaching about China in business schools is even more challenging. Business, after all, is supposed to be about markets, contracts, margins. China, however, refuses that comfort. Perhaps this is true elsewhere as well, but with China you don’t even get the chance to fully buy into the fantasy. Sooner or later, you realize that what you need for China is politics, history, ideology, culture, projection. You may start your curriculum in a very business-by-the-book manner; by week three, you answer student questions on dialectics between socialism and capitalism; different values; tariffs and sanctions; corruption and purges; and geopolitical questions that Chinese interlocutors may consider sensitive. Of course, perhaps my background in social sciences has informed my tendency to complicate things and love uncomfortable discussions, but I see this as an asset: while I just can’t pretend that China is simply a market to be conquered, I can present “the rich context” in which our China studies take place in great detail. For companies, this matters because misreading China today is less about cultural faux pas and more about operating with the wrong mental map of risk, opportunity, and adaptability.

Thus, to teach about China in Europe you first need to be a good listener. China is already a cognitive challenge for students before you say a word. They come sometimes over-equipped with headlines, memes, and TikTok takes: a lot of this blends New Cold War geopolitics, “tech bro” irony, or simply unchecked optimism – and often everything at once. Of course, this is a holographic projection of China - most students have never been to China, and in fact, most have never even been to a Chinese restaurant. Yet they are curious, often genuinely so, or they become curious already after the first class, and some of them in fact end up exploring more after the course finishes. 

This may sound like a fun intellectual exercise, but it isn’t. We live in an intensely geopolitical age. I would be the first to argue that geopolitics has always mattered; what has changed over the past decade is that it has stopped being background noise and become the main soundtrack - with China right at its center. For firms, this shift implies that political narratives now have to be factored in any commercial calculation.

I remember the “good old days,” which were in fact not good in objective sense – but I was young and exploring the world. It was immediately after the global financial crisis, when Europe and China were flirting openly. Investment forums, mayoral visits, joint ventures, and initiatives with names that sounded future-oriented and utopian. Then came the cooling phase, and after 2016, a decisive securitization turn. COVID finished the job. China became untouchable, not analytically, but socially. It became a place you could mention only with disclaimers. The war in Ukraine hardened lines further. America’s shift toward a more belligerent posture further hardened this dynamic, but it also exposed growing lines of division between the United States and Europe.

The irony is that the hardening was sold as realism and waking up from idealist naivete. In practice, the hardening often produced the opposite: it became apparent that increasingly our reading of China was not based so much on realities, but rather on new ideological projections. So, teaching about China felt surreal, especially to business students. You’re suddenly explaining how to negotiate in a country that students are told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, not to engage with. China was suddenly not only far, but also closed and even abstract, unreal, unreachable.

Coming from a Yugoslav background helped me maintain my footing. When you originate from a place that has lived through alignment, non-alignment, disintegration, and reinvention, and which still feels like work in progress, you are not bothered by uncertainty. You learn early that the world doesn’t end when narratives and paradigms collapse, although you are well aware that this is also not something very comfortable to experience.

This is why for instance in times of the deepest crises in Europe-China relations I doubled down on my Yugoslavia-China pet project. When I started it, I thought I am indulging myself in a historical detour, but soon realized that this was in fact a much-needed sanity check. What that project taught me, beyond archives and footnotes, is a practical message for business: even in periods of rupture (of which Yugoslavia and China had many), someone has to keep a door open. Cooperation doesn’t disappear; but simply adapts, becomes smarter, more sensitive, and does not lose the big picture from sight. And this is what we teach in International Business, even when politics insists otherwise.

Of course, material realities have stood in the way of the geopolitics of our day and age, helping me maintain such position: the business allure of China hasn’t faded. One can even say that it has intensified. Western executives and leaders are often publicly cautious, but privately alert. The sheer size, the experimentation and innovation at scale, the relentless tempo of work render China really the centre of the global economy, despite any legitimate objections one may have about how it functions. And when European students actually go to China, their eyes light up. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s real and intense. They also learn that the interest in cooperation is reciprocated – though they also learn even more about the numerous hurdles and obstacles in doing so. This is also why many European firms are quietly shifting from asking whether to engage with China to asking how to do so in more selective, modular, and resilient ways.

In 2026, things are again changing, and there are ever louder policy signals issued by Western leaders that cooperation is cool again, although under new conditions, as the world has really changed. This makes teaching about China these days even more interesting and perhaps necessary – and in some sense, more doable; it is certainly not easier, but definitely more honest. What I see now is the challenge is how to strip away (Western) hubris without sliding into naivete, and how to retain critical grounding without being antagonistic. China doesn’t need cheerleaders or exorcists. The West doesn’t need enemies or messiahs. Both China and the West need partnerships.

But before that, we need knowledge and understanding of both us and the others. One message I try to send students in the classroom is that the real payoff in my classes isn’t learning about China. It’s learning about ourselves: our fears, projections, and blind spots. In that sense, China remains what it has always been – a market, an investor, a partner, a competitor – but above all, a mirror of both our strengths and weaknesses. In this sense, the real strategic risk now is not how we position ourselves towards China, but whether we can bother ourselves to always learn, improve, adapt. Refusing to do so guarantees irrelevance.