At this year’s Europe Asia Young Leaders Forum for the third time, 50 young leaders from a wide range of Asian and European countries came together to get to know each other, exchange views and experiences, and broaden their personal network.

The forum took place in the city centre of Beijing and was a joint initiative of the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt, the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS), based in Shanghai, and the NUS Entrepreneurship Centre, based in Singapore.

During the conference, the young managers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and politicians explored the conference topic “The Boundaries of Trust in a Borderless Economy”.
This topic was perceived as very relevant, with a majority of the young leaders working in international and highly mobile environments and being confronted with “trust challenges” on a daily basis.

As a consequence, the inspiring and controversial speeches by business leaders and leading academics were followed by extremely lively debates. The participants tried to define what makes us trust one another in different societies and how different concepts of trust influence the development of international business relations. Other key issues were the latent conflict between corporate governance and the interests of the shareholders, and the question to what extent global acting companies must assume responsibility in and adapt to local cultures overseas.

Once again, the dialogue was not limited to the roundtable discussions in the conference room. For the “Networking in Nature” programme the participants were taken to an unrestored part of the Great Wall in the hilly area north of Beijing.
Personal contacts were strengthened when the young leaders, divided into four competing teams, had to cooperate closely to meet a variety of physical and intellectual challenges.