Every Saturday afternoon a seminar is held in a modern office building near the Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing. The organisers, Beijing Wanji Consultancy Company, started advertising the seminars eight weeks ago in Beijing Youth Daily, the newspaper favoured by students. They expected that, at most, a dozen people would turn up.
Instead, the little room has been packed each weekend with 50 to 60 young people. The subject of the seminar is Ireland, or to be more precise, the prospect of studying business or accountancy in Ireland.
The advertisement depicts the Land of Saints and Scholars in glowing terms. Under the heading, "Ten major reasons for choosing Ireland as the place for studying," it lists the following: 1, Cheaper cost of living and studying and perfect welfare insurance; 2, simple and quick formalities for studying in Ireland without TOEFL and IELTS (English language proficiency tests); 3, typical and pure English-speaking country with four Nobel literature prize-winners; 4, perfect and excellent education system with high-quality education level; 6, pastoral nation with poetic charm and a major tourist destination in Europe; 7, traditional, simple and honest folk ways with local traits and strong cultural atmosphere; 8, member of EU, making it convenient to travel from here to other countries; 9, first-class commercial education recognised by the international community and flexible mechanism for study; and 10, international school embracing multi-national cultures.
Who would not want to study in such an academic idyll? Ireland has not been targeted before by students from communist China but the new entrepreneurial generation is desperately looking round the world for new places to learn modern commercial methods.
Ireland also needs the students, says Mr Diarmuid Moroney, founder-president of the Dublin Business School in Aungier Street, Dublin, who was in Beijing on Friday at the invitation of the organiser of the seminars, Mr (Tony) Tang Tao, CEO of International Education and Business Resources.
Ireland needs to replace Asian students who can no longer afford the fees or cost of living in Ireland since the collapse of south-east Asian economies. Since he founded the Dublin Business School in 1975, hundreds of Malaysian students enrolled. However, the Malaysian ringgit is so devalued that funding will not be available next year and few Malaysian parents can now afford to send their children abroad.
This is a loss of some £10,000 a year to Ireland per student, half in fees, the other half in living costs, said Mr Moroney, who is visiting four other cities in China to talk about his college. "Irish student numbers are going down and we have to look abroad to maintain our intake," he said. The college currently has 1,000 full-time and 1,600 part-time students in Dublin and 500 on a campus in Malaysia, and is opening a campus in Karachi, Pakistan, in September with an initial intake of 100 students. China has not devalued its currency and many parents from the new business class in cities like Beijing can afford to pay fees up-front in hard currency, like US dollars.
Mr Tang, a fluent English-speaker who is typical of a new generation of smart, young Chinese executives, hopes to send a pilot group of 10-15 students to Ireland soon.
First, however, they will have to get over the hurdle of obtaining student visas. Whereas Malaysian students can come to Dublin with little trouble, Chinese students' visa applications are likely to be refused routinely by the Department of Justice and allowed only on appeal.
Countries such as Australia have encountered problems with Chinese applications: about 40 per cent are refused, partly because of detected forgery of documents. Of the 30,000-40,000 admitted every year, many stay as illegal immigrants.
Mr Tang believes Ireland is the most attractive proposition in Europe for the acquisition of badly-needed business know-how for the new China. "Through comprehensive comparison with other European countries we think that Ireland is more suitable because living expenses and student fees are cheaper."