NEWS

In September 9, 2009, a newspaper office held a discussion forum to publish a list of Chinese Corporations those lack Corporation Social Responsibility. Many famous corporations, such as Sanlu Group, Wandashan Pharmaceutical Company, Snow Beer and TAIJI GROUP LTD, are all on the top fifteen list. What’s more ridiculous, several large building collapsed when they just had been built only in the year 2009 in China. So a question is put forward seriously: Is CSR Absent in Chinese Corporation？
The answer I can not give right now. Still and all, it may come out by my analysis in the following words.
No matter how much well Chinese corporations do, the concept of CSR is become more and more familiar to Chinese businessman. However, many years ago, the awareness of CRS was lacked in Chinese generally. Almost all Chinese corporations just knew to maximizing profits for its shareholder.
The lack of awareness of CRS is reasoned from immature economic circumstances in China. After the policy of reformation and opening being published, Chinese economic began to develop rapidly. And it provided a lot of opportunities to let many people who are not well educated or have poor ethics got a large amount of money in a not long time. Those businessmen only concentrate on short term profit, but the current immature economic circumstances allow them to continue developing. So that may result that Chinese businessmen still had no awareness in the next years.
The father of CSR, H .R. Bowen has divided CSR into 4 responsibilities by different levels. According to priority, these 4 responsibilities are economic responsibility, legal responsibility, ethical responsibility and voluntary (charitable) responsibility. Economic responsibility is primary, also is mandatory, and the other three responsibilities are beyond the "bottom line". Similar to the triple bottom line, the first layer economic responsibility are not only seek the profit of shareholders. However, a lot of businessmen in China didn’t reach the bottom line. So it’s obvious that CSR is absent in most of Chinese corporation in old days. Next I’ll change my attention to today’s Chinese corporation.
Nowadays, more and more corporations recognize the importance of Corporation Social Responsibility and draw more attention to it. In the collection for snow disaster and the earthquake in Sichuan, it seems that a CSR bandwagon is coming. Thousands of enterprises and entrepreneurs donated a large amount of money to show their benevolence and mercy. Is it a good change?
Let us look at the Sanlu milk incident, in the evening of September 11,2008 , Chinese Ministry of Health noted that the Sanlu milk product contains harmful ingredients melamine, which resulted that many infants suffer from lithiasis in urinary system. However, before this incident happened, Sanlu Group have participated in
many charitable activities. It used to corporate with the China Environmental Protection Foundation, contribute for the financing of China's ecological environment in poor areas. This behavior won highly prize of populace. Similarly, Nongfu Spring co ltd has advertised that once you drink a bottle of Nongfu spring, you will donate a penny for the Hope Project. Nevertheless, just several days ago, three kinds of products have been found to contain arsenic which is a kind of poison.
Combining with these two incidents, those Philadelphia behaviors they used to do are just like some big shows for public. They just try to use blatant acts of charity to win public’s favor in order to sell more products and then get more benefits. In the other word, we can say that they regard the money used in Philadelphia activities as a investment to generated more money later.
In fact, that’s a common situation in China. The CSR bandwagon caused by domestic entrepreneurs is not as wonderful as it appeared. Most of domestic enterprises take CSR as strategic CSR. They do Philadelphia activities targeting toward “programs that will generate the most positive publicity or goodwill for the organization” (Andrew Ghillyer). However, there is another top 15 list which to praise those corporations that have CSR. There are some entrepreneurs, like the former Lenovo CEO Liu Chuanzhi, upholding the values and responsibilities perpetually and have the initiatives to do charitable activities.
Even though CSR of Chinese corporations have been improved a lot with the gradual maturity of domestic law and economic circumstances, it still needs to be concerned about. Focusing on the transparency of corporation, knowledge of customers and other driving forces behind CSR can improve it more.
For my current life, I just can go to www.carboncounter.org to calculate the carbon dioxide emissions because of me. But in my future business life, CSR is very important to me. Learn from those good examples, like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, do ethical CSR and earn long term money to let my business develop continually. Maybe taking efforts together with other ethical businessmen, the situation that most Chinese corporations just do strategic CSR can be changed.

(Author Background:As a Summer Intern of WETECH,Cathy owned special experience on work and business in the three months June-August 2010)