This Day, That Year: March 28

Editor's note: This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China.

An item on March 28, 1994, in China Daily showed the country's first homegrown Master of Business Administration graduates getting their degrees at Tsinghua University in Beijing.

The MBA program was introduced in China in 1991 with nine colleges offering courses. In 1999, the country had 9,000 MBA graduates, whereas the United States trained 70,000 students annually.

Now, there are more than 200 schools offering MBA degrees across China.

By the end of 2015, China had 258,000 MBA graduates, according to the Ministry of Education.

In 2002, executive MBA programs were introduced by a number of institutions, including Fudan University in Shanghai and Peking University.

Currently, more than 60 Chinese universities are authorized by the ministry to offer Executive MBA programs. EMBA courses have come under tighter regulations since 2016 when the China National MBA Education Supervisory Committee announced all Chinese EMBA applicants were required to take the national postgraduate entrance exam.

Universities offering such programs have the power of autonomous recruitment. Tuition fees for all MBA programs will be collected in strict accordance with regulations, according to the rules.

It was not the first time that the government had tightened EMBA regulations. In 2014, the central government banned officials and executives of State-owned enterprises from pursuing expensive EMBA courses.