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China's State-Centric Approach to Corporate Social Responsibility Overseas: A Case Study in Africa

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2020

Bingyu Liu
Bingyu Liu*
Affiliation:
China University of Political Science and Law, School of International Law, Beijing (China). Email: bingyu.liu@cupl.edu.cn.
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Abstract

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is conventionally understood as voluntary and market- based corporate behaviour without direct government involvement. The development of CSR in China challenges this understanding in the light of the growing role of government in promoting it. Over the past decade China has demonstrated a state-centric approach towards promoting CSR. Existing studies focus only on Chinese domestic CSR practices. However, with the rise of Chinese companies in Africa under China's ‘Belt and Road Initiative’, it is important to examine how the state-centric approach applies to the overseas CSR practice of Chinese companies. This article aims to fill the literature gap through in-depth interviews and analysis of the Standard Gauge Railway project in Kenya. It shows that close institutional, relational, and bureaucratic ties between the state and the business community give the Chinese government the power to influence the behaviour of Chinese state-owned enterprises overseas. The Chinese government can influence the CSR practices of Chinese companies overseas through mandating, facilitating, endorsing and partnering in order to minimize the negative externalities of companies’ overseas activities. However, the state-centric CSR approach limits the space for civil society engagement and the effectiveness of the approach abroad is constrained by a variety of institutional contexts and corporate ownership models.

Keywords

Chinese foreign investmentAfricaState-centric corporate social responsibility (CSR)Kenyan Standard Gauge Railway
Type
Article
Information
Transnational Environmental Law , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 57 - 84
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Pitman Potter, Liwen Lin and Victor V. Ramraj for their comments on previous versions of the article. I would like to thank the reviewers for their comments for the improvement of the article.

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98 Ibid.

99 Ibid.

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101 Interview with Vice-Secretary of the KCETA, Kenya, Dec. 2016.

102 Ibid.

103 Kenya China Economic and Trade Association, ‘2017 Chinese Overseas Companies in Kenya Social Responsibility Report’, 2017, pp. 16, 28, 30, 48, available at: http://ke2.mofcom.gov.cn/17en.pdf.

104 Interview with Project Manager of the SGR project, Kenya, Sept. 2016.

105 Interview with Vice-Secretary of the KCETA, n. 101 above.

106 Interview with Project Manager of the SGR project, n. 104 above.

107 Interview with Public Relations Officer of the SGR project, Kenya, Sept. 2016.

108 Interview with Project Manager of WWF-Africa, n. 71 above.

109 Ibid.

110 Interview with Program Officer of China House, Jan. 2017.

111 Interview with Project Manager of WWF-Africa, n. 71 above.

112 Interview with Project Manager of China Exim Bank, China, July 2016.

113 Ibid.