Business circles in China are organised on a different axis from those in Europe or North America. Which chamber you belong to matters less than the club you were invited into, the forum you speak at, the business school you attended and the group chat you sit in. For a Chinese chief executive, and for a foreign leader whose work depends on China, the useful map is not one of institutions but of the four or five layers that overlap in every large company's calendar.
The entrepreneur clubs
The China Entrepreneur Club, founded in 2006 by a group of entrepreneurs, economists and former diplomats, gathers the founders of large private Chinese companies and organises delegations and dialogues abroad. The Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum, founded in 2001, holds its annual meeting at the Yabuli resort in Heilongjiang and has become the place where private-sector leaders discuss their own conditions. Zhenghe Island is a membership community and media platform for entrepreneurs, built on local chapters and online groups rather than on a single annual gathering. The Hupan centre in Hangzhou, created by a group of entrepreneurs as a school for founders, was renamed in 2021 and now presents itself as a research and study centre.
The national forums
The Boao Forum for Asia, founded in 2001 and headquartered in Boao on the island of Hainan, holds the region's best-known annual conference. The China Development Forum, organised in Beijing each spring by a research body attached to the State Council, puts the chief executives of the largest global companies in the same room as Chinese officials, and is for many foreign groups the most valuable two days of the year. The World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of the New Champions, known as Summer Davos, rotates between Chinese cities and gathers younger companies alongside established ones.
The federation
The All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce is the national body for private enterprise and its local chambers of commerce, with organisations in every province and city. For a Chinese company, membership is the standard channel between the private sector and the administration, and its local chambers are often where a mid-sized company's most practical relationships are built.
The business school alumni networks
Two institutions carry a disproportionate share of Chinese executive networking. CEIBS, the China Europe International Business School, founded in Shanghai in 1994 as a joint venture between the Chinese government and the European Union, has an alumni network that runs through the country's largest companies. Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business, founded in Beijing in 2002, built its programme around the founders and chairs of private companies, and its alumni association functions as a network in its own right. In China more than elsewhere, an executive programme is bought for the cohort as much as for the curriculum.
The foreign chambers
AmCham China, based in Beijing with chapters in other cities, and the separate American chambers in Shanghai and South China, represent United States companies and publish regular surveys of their members' conditions. The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, founded in 2000 by European companies, publishes an annual position paper and runs working groups by sector. CCI France Chine serves French companies from offices in several cities. For a foreign leader these chambers are the fastest route to peers facing the same regulatory questions, and the slowest route to a Chinese counterpart.
The chapters and the private channels
YPO and EO both have chapters in mainland China, in Shanghai, Beijing and the southern cities, and they bring the small-group method to founders who otherwise meet only at conferences. Running alongside them is the layer no organisation chart shows: the WeChat groups built around a cohort, a club, an industry or a single transaction, where introductions are made and where most business conversation actually happens. A foreign leader who has the chambers but not the group chats has half a network.
What is missing
Chinese business circles are rich in founder-to-founder conversation and comparatively thin in the cross-sector room: the format where a chief executive sits as a peer with a public official, an academic and a civil-society leader, under an explicit rule of confidentiality, over a year rather than an afternoon. The international layer is largely transactional as well. Chinese leaders travel constantly and are rarely inside a foreign peer circle as members rather than as guests.
The World Leaders Society for leaders in China and with China
The World Leaders Society is an international association founded in Paris in 2025 under French non-profit law. Its peer forums bring together eight to twelve members, mixing business leaders, elected officials and senior public officers, and civil-society figures, under the Chatham House rule, with prestige lunches with guests of honour and an annual summit alongside. Forums are formed by region as members join, beginning with Europe and Africa. Its 2026 WLS 100, an editorial selection of one hundred leaders across forty-four countries, six continents and eight categories, includes leaders based in China alongside others from India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Mongolia. There is no WLS chapter and no WLS event in China, and the governance provides for local chapters as regional anchoring. Admission is by application with two recommendations, reviewed by an independent approval committee, with no age limit, and fifty inaugural seats are open for 2026. Applications are open both from leaders based in China and from leaders whose work depends on it.
In China you are introduced before you are met. The rarer thing is a room you enter as an equal rather than as a guest.WLS Editorial
An editorial analysis from the World Leaders Society.
All analyses
