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China 2020
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China 2020

How Western Business Can – and Should – Influence Social and Political Change in the Coming Decade

Michael A. Santoro
ILR Press, 2009
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8

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Recommendation

To what lengths will Western businesses travel in order to make profits in China? What morals and principles are they willing to sacrifice for a taste of success? Associate professor of business Michael A. Santoro investigates this subject by focusing on four salient issues: sweatshops, illegal drug manufacturing, Internet censorship and the rule of law. He offers a lucid, well-reasoned, though at times academic, analysis of how businesses are cashing in on corruption, weak regulation and the de facto absence of the rule of law instead of trying to improve conditions in China. Although some of Santoro’s conclusions seem idealistic (for example, inject foreign firms operating in China with a sense of morality and you will fix China’s problems), getAbstract recommends his brief but excellent argument that Western corporations have a responsibility for human rights proportional to their ability to make a difference.

Summary

The Moral Compass

The opening of the Beijing Olympics on August 8, 2008 focused the world’s attention on a modern, prosperity-driven China. On October 1, 1949, a short distance from where the new Olympic stadium now stands, Chairman Mao declared the foundation of a new Communist China – the People’s Republic of China. Since then, the country has departed radically from its staunchly Communist creed, preferring to follow former leader Deng Xiaoping’s assertion that “to get rich is glorious.” If Chairman Mao’s People’s Republic was the new China, the China of the Olympics was the new, new China.

Yet, despite so many advances in the new, new China, many things have not changed at all. The Chinese government still does not function under the rule of law. Its human rights practices are questionable or even suspect. Corruption is endemic. Pollution is widespread. Western critics and Chinese citizens both find fault with the new, new China, but a wide gulf divides them. Westerners focus on such issues as environmentalism, human rights, sweatshops, Tibet and unsafe products. The Chinese are more concerned about the rising cost of living, the unequal distribution of income, ...

About the Author

Michael A. Santoro is associate professor of business ethics at the Rutgers Business School. He is the author of Profits and Principles: Global Capitalism and Human Rights in China.

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