The summit forum on corporate social responsibility and consuming environment, held in Beijing.	The Beijing Aimer Lingerie Co., Ltd. is initiator of the Hope Fund that sponsors 200 girl students from impoverished families.	A middle school in Tingri County, Tibet is the happy recipient of computers donated by an inland enterprise.

Chinese people often derisively refer to the rapidly prepared offerings of McDonald’s and KFC as “junk food.” Yet it was they that made the common people of China aware of corporate social responsibilities (CSR) undertaken by transnational companies. When the two fast food chains entered China in the 1990s, public toilets were scarce and the washrooms in hotels and restaurants were not for public use. It was only McDonald’s and KFC that allowed anyone at all, whether or not they purchased food in their restaurants, to use their washrooms. The McDonald’s and KFC logos consequently have particular significance to members of the Chinese general public, whether or not they eat there. A similar public spiritedness is now being displayed by a number of Chinese enterprises that have begun to make their washroom facilities open to the public. On rainy days, signs can also be seen in certain stores assuring shoppers that they are: “Welcome to take shelter from rain.” It would appear, therefore, that corporate social responsibility, a concept introduced by transnational companies, is being taken on by Chinese enterprises.

More than 2,500 enterprises have participated in the Global Compact – a voluntary international corporate citizenship network initiated by secretary general of the United Nations Kofi Annan in 1999 to advance responsible corporate citizenship and universal social and environmental principles – corporate responsibility/accountability is now accepted by most enterprises. According to Professor Wang Zhile, advocate of corporate social responsibility and director of the Transnational Company Research Center of the Ministry of Commerce, the concept has three main facets: economic accountability (shareholder accountability), social accountability and environmental accountability (ecological accountability). The entry into China of large numbers of transnational companies brought with it the CSR trend, and it has since had considerable influence on Chinese enterprises and the economy.

Since 2002, China has convened many meetings and seminars on corporate accountability. In late 2005, the China CSR League was established in Beijing, and China’s first comprehensive Draft of Social Accountability of Chinese Enterprises was formulated. Since then, forums and summit meetings on the concept have become commonplace.

At the Global Compact Leaders Summit 2006, Yi Xiaozhun, vice minister of commerce, revealed that the Ministry of Commerce has made promoting corporate social responsibility a main feature of its work of changing the growth mode of foreign trade in 2006. He stated that the CSR concept would be vital to the “comprehensive sustainable development” and “building a harmonious society” campaigns currently being promoted by the Chinese government.

Corporate social responsibility constitutes commitment on the part of businesses to contribute to sustainable economic development by working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large in order to improve living standards in ways that are good for business and for development, according to the World Bank. It bears strong similarity to the traditional Chinese concepts of cultivating oneself, keeping one’s household in order, efficiently running the local government, thus bringing peace to the entire country and of extending respect for the aged in one's family to those of other families and extending the love for one’s younger family members to those of other families.

In the early to mid 1990s, China’s state-owned enterprises had a tradition of operating social programs in which they acknowledged social responsibilities relating to the “birth, aging, illness and death” of staff and their family members. Enterprises actually took on the responsibilities that should have come under the auspices of social public services. Maximization of corporate social responsibility led to disintegration of these traditions for economic reasons. Large numbers of state-owned enterprises ran at such a degree of loss that they were unable to fulfill their basic economic expectations, let alone their social and environmental responsibilities.

As China goes through its transition from a planned to a market economy, survival is a problem for many enterprises. Professor Wang Zhile perceives an enterprise’s development as being in three stages: making a profit; expanding in scale; and acting as a corporate citizen. He believes that many Chinese enterprises lack corporate social responsibility because they are still at the stage of maximizing shareholders’ interests. In a survey conducted by The Economic Observer, 31 percent of respondents thought that Chinese enterprises lack corporate social responsibility due to the immaturity of China’s market economy and enterprise development.

The Corporate Social Responsibility research project undertaken by Professor Wang Zhile was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation. Since 2003, he and his colleagues have visited the headquarters of more than 30 transnational companies in Japan, the Republic of Korea, Europe and the United States. In China, they held talks with representatives of more than 80 transnational companies, and visited the China headquarters of more than 30 transnational companies. Professor Wang Zhile worked as chief editor on the book entitled Soft Competitive Advantage: Corporate Responsibilities of Transnational Corporations. The Chinese Entrepreneurs Magazine once invited leaders of more than ten famous Chinese enterprises to talk about their development strategy in the coming decade, but few had confidence enough to take up the offer. Professor Wang believes that the main challenge Chinese advanced enterprises face when competing with transnational corporations is that of raising their CSR awareness.

As Professor Wang sees it, in the ten years from the 1980s to the early 1990s Chinese enterprises introduced large quantities of advanced technologies from abroad. In the decade after, Chinese enterprises learned about the modern enterprise system. Upon entering the 21st century, they are now at the stage of learning advanced enterprise concepts, of which corporate social responsibility is one of the most important.