27 May 2026
Remarks at London Business School
Former MP and long-time China watcher Mark Logan delivered a wide-ranging speech at London Business School this week, urging Western business leaders and policymakers to be more curious about China rather than retreat into anxiety.
Speaking at the school's Regent's Park campus as part of a panel titled Rewiring Globalisation, Logan drew on his two decades of experience in China to argue that the West risks being left behind by failing to match the intellectual curiosity that once drove China's own modernisation.
He opened with a personal story about his father, who left an unfulfilling job in the early 1980s to build a business from a fish and chip shop into a healthcare enterprise.
Logan drew a direct parallel with the entrepreneurs of Wenzhou, arguing that the spirit of bootstrap ambition was a universal language that transcended borders.
Logan went on to challenge what he described as the dominant Western instinct to view China "through the lens of simply threat rather than through more nuance including the lens of opportunity." He argued that the discomfort felt across Western capitals was a familiar historical pattern. "The United States found it uncomfortable when Japan rose," he said. "Britain found it uncomfortable when America surpassed it."
He reserved particular emphasis for the question of human capital, warning that the flow of talent and knowledge between China and the West had been dangerously one-directional. Western students, executives and civil servants, he argued, had not gone to learn in China at anything close to the scale of Chinese students coming West - an imbalance he called "an intellectual and strategic impoverishment."
Logan also pointed to China's Township and Village Enterprises as a model that Western business education had largely overlooked, suggesting the next evolution of business schools and corresponding programmes may emerge from China rather than Harvard or Oxford.
He closed by addressing LBS students directly, telling them they were "uniquely placed" to be the human element of a rewired world.