CSR / Integrity

I recently attended a Sino-German trade event at the quaintly named Belgian EU Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. A wide range of German and Chinese business leaders spoke for short slots on different aspects of CSR compliance in supply chains. Germany has strong economic ties with China and seem to have been relatively successful in supporting the development of CSR through its trading partners led by GTZ, a German government institution.

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This Friday, I shall be one of the judges for final of the national Social Entrepreneurship Business Competition. MBA students from across China have been through preliminary finals which have included training programmes on launching how they can launch their social enterprises.

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The winners of the Social Entrepreneurship Business Competition at Friday's national final for MBA students was a team from China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) called "BiBang". Their business plan is to launch an online platform dedicated to helping people better manage their health, particularly those who require regular and chronic monitoring of their health status.

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Two farmers with buffalo in a dried water pond in drought-hit Guizhou, south-west China. [Photo/CFP] Barely a week goes by at the moment without news of another mining accident leaving miners trapped underground and lucky to be rescued. The usual story is that the mine had been ordered to be closed in 2009 but carried on illegally and then a gas explosion or flooding or both rips through mines and mining communities usually in Sichuan or Henan.

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ChinaCSR.com is a website full of news about different ways in which Chinese businesses are engaging in CSR. Recently CSRChina reported on a group of 29 foreign-funded companies from Wuhan who signed up to "a proposal on corporate social responsibility commitment". But what does this exactly mean in the world of top-down driven CSR in China? The report tells us that the "proposal on corporate social responsibility commitment" will include:

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I have just spoken to 60 MBA students from a range of Chinese universities about social entrepreneurship. They are first round team finalists from an all-China social entrepreneurship competition sponsored by Tencent, China's largest internet provider. In this phase of the competition they attend a four-day Social Entrepreneurship Training Programme which, according to the brochure, will fuel them with ideas and resources to establish sustainable enterprises.

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In China, the word for integrity is 诚信 (cheng-xin / honest-trustworthy) and has become a well-used media word in the context of the prosecution of corruption in both public and private sectors. Headline news today (8 Jan) was that all SOE (state-owned enterprises) execs were going through the "graft scanner", the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (the CCDI).

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The China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) hosted a two day conference with the rather challenging title: "Best Practice from Europe and China”. The conference was attended by 200 people representing business, government and NGOs in China and demonstrated the rapid and keen interest in this topic.

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China Europe International Business School, 20 August 2009:
This was a day for 190 new MBA students to consider the ethical challenges of managing businesses. I always enjoy the rich, lengthy and varied challenges that come from addressing MBA students. The topic for my session, which involved an extensive Q&A, was Ethics and Marketing: Can we do good and do well?

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Warsaw Stock Exchange, 26 October 2009:

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