I was born in China many years ago but I have been away from China for most of my life. It was in the summer of 2000 when I had the opportunity to spend a full year of sabbatical at Peking University. The sabbatical opened a new chapter in my life. It groomed my scholarly interest in China. What I found in the years since the summer of 2000 is that China is a large intellectual puzzle with not thousands but millions of pieces that have yet to be put together. No one, not economists, not sociologists, not psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists, or journalists, is able to tell the full story of why China has been able to sustain the 8% annual productivity gain for the past twenty years, and it is forging ahead full steam to become the world's largest economic power within the next ten to fifteen years. Yet, this market economy blossomed in the garden of the communist/socialist ideology. The massive restructuring of the state sector firms led to millions of displaced workers yet there is no sign of the feared social unrest. Life in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou is exciting and prosperous. Yet, rural reform is progressing at a snail's pace. Entrepreneurship is the name of the game but corruption is still a challenge. The MBA degree is a hot pursuit as all enterprises strive to adopt professional management. Yet, there is not a systematic body of management knowledge to explain how Chinese firms operate and why some have achieved phenomenal results. How Chinese companies and the Chinese workforce in aggregate are able to sustain the 8% productivity gain over the past twenty years remains an intellectual puzzle that begs for a scholarly explanation. It is the wish to solve this intellectual puzzle and to fill this knowledge gap that seeded the idea for the International Association for Chinese Management Research.

IACMR was organized with the aim to promote, facilitate, and advance the field of Chinese management research by scholars both inside China and outside. IACMR will be the bridge that links scholars around the globe with a common interest. It will provide a forum for the intellectual exchange, mutual learning, and collective pursuit of questions about firm behavior and individual behavior within firms in this rapidly changing landscape. Knowledge generated will be useful not only to broaden the effective management of firms in China but also, more importantly, contribute to the body of management knowledge globally.

Clearly, management research on and in China is at its infant stage. Our colleagues in China have both the obligation and the opportunity to develop this field not only through their personal involvement in research but also, more importantly, through the development of the next generation of scholars. IACMR can be an invaluable resource for our Chinese colleagues in fulfilling this critical responsibility. It is my most sincere desire that IACMR will be the instrument to facilitate and promote international collaboration in the intellectual development of a field of research that will add significant value to global knowledge.