Business 'incubator' breeds entrepreneurs, and controversy

(Ecns.cn)--At a college in Zhejiang Province, business comes first. Students are encouraged to manage online stores, allowed to skip classes to deal with business problems and can trade the ratings of their Taobao shops for school credit.

By applying such a distinctive method, the Yiwu Industrial & Commercial College (YICC) in the eastern coastal province has garnered wide attention and become the source of some dispute, reports the Xinmin Weekly.

Pundits argue the method was designed to cultivate applied talents and encourage innovation via Yiwu's commodities market platform. Others say education should not put money-making first.

The college established the Start-up Center at the end of 2008 in a bid to help students open online stores. Classrooms with Internet connections and storehouses were offered to each department at the center, while teachers were assigned to impart practical skills such as photo editing, business negotiations and product sourcing.

At the YICC, piles of goods litter campus dormitories and corridors; students tote boxes of merchandise instead of books; and trucks from logistics companies such as EMS arrive every day at half past five to deliver articles to every corner of China, www.ywnews.cn reveals.

The center is an "incubation park" where the whole chain of e-commerce, including sales, storage and logistics, can be found, according to the website.

Yang Fugang was the center's first hero. Legend has it that Yang came from a poor family and started his fortune by scavenging through the school's garbage. He opened his first store in 2007 on taobao.com, China's largest e-commerce platform. Business was brisk, and Yang soon became a model for other young students.

"I never thought I could do this well," Yang, who earned $75,000 in his final year before graduating, told The New York Times. "I started out selling yoga mats and now I'm selling a lot of makeup and cosmetics. The profit margins are higher."

Taobao fever swept the YICC not long after, making the Start-up Center the top choice for youngsters with dollar signs in their eyes.

Only students whose existing Taobao stores have ratings of four diamonds or whose monthly incomes exceed 5,000 yuan are allowed to apply; and students must earn 10,000 yuan per month and run three-diamond shops before they can graduate.

Yet competition for admission is always fierce. "A man who doesn't want to be a general is a bad soldier; while a youngster who doesn't want to go to the Start-up Center is a bad student," Ren Shouyi, a freshman at the School of Economics and Management, tells the Xinmin Weekly.

As a result, the school has been criticized as being overly focused on teaching students how to make profits instead of good old-fashioned book learning.

Zhu Huabing, head of the Start-up Center, responds that many students at the YICC were regarded as "losers" before they came to the college, so they opted for a nontraditional way to build a competitive edge and find their own niche in the job market.

Liu Hewei, a lecturer at the Guilin University of Technology, also strongly backs the YICC, noting that the program puts theory into practice.

However, as B2B products and services gain stronger momentum, student-run businesses are being increasingly threatened by big companies entering the e-commerce industry.

To survive, many inexperienced young adults are trying to gain a small market share by selling high-quality imitations of famous brands for lower prices.

But Li Chengdong, a network analyst at paidai.com, a website that serves as an entrance to Chinese e-commerce, points out that related industry regulations are gradually being improved, a shift that will eventually lead to trouble for students.

He adds that leaders at the YICC should adopt reforms to help the kids find more opportunities.

Zhu Huabing also suggests that students should not all sell the same types of products. "They should have the labor divided according to their specialties, and be able to provide excellent service at every link, such as promotion."