McKinsey China's head said the country's major companies would need to hire as many as 75,000 executives over the next decade to drive their international expansion.

Chinese companies had what it took to be among the best in the world, but they were not there yet, McKinsey Greater said.

"GE, the Johnson & Johnsons and Citigroup, they took 100 years to grow and apprentice that sort of talent. China's going to have to do it inside a decade," he said.

The consultancy firm had been successful in raising the aspirations of potential top executives in China and helping them understand what it took to be a successful player in the international market, he said.

McKinsey has been in China for 12 years and now has 15 local partners.

In China, career paths were more rigidly defined and there was no job security for executives and a longer-term sense of what they could achieve at companies, Greater said.

"The development opportunities that Chinese companies have provided to their employees is not as good as the best global corporations. That is the biggest challenge for Chinese companies," he said.

He cited the example of Liu Xiang, China's 110-meter Olympic champion hurdler at last year's Athens Olympics who excelled in an unexpected field, as a model of the ability of Chinese business leaders to surprise positively in terms of what they could achieve sooner rather than later.

(Xinhua News Agency June 16, 2005)