The Impact Of Confucian Culture On Charitable Donations Of Family Businesses: Promotion Or Hindrance

Our country is in the historical stage of economic transformation and upgrading and a solid promotion of common prosperity.The government and the public attach great importance to the performance of corporate social responsibility.As an important way to fulfill responsibilities,the Fifth Plenary Session of the 19 th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China clearly pointed out that charitable donation is an important measure to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor,and stressed that charitable donation should play a dominant role as the third distribution.Furthermore,the vigorous development of Chinese philanthropy is inseparable from the support of enterprises.Family businesses are the main force in charitable donation.At present,the research on charitable donation of family business is mainly carried out from the level of family governance,executive characteristics and system.However,people and organizations composed of people are deeply immersed in specific national and regional cultural traditions,and Confucian culture is the representative of excellent traditional culture in China.The formation and development of family enterprises in China are closely related to Confucian culture,which emphasizes the thoughts of "family orientation","benevolence","justice for profit","kindness for good" and "kindness for good",which have a profound influence on the charitable concept of family enterprises.Therefore,the study on charitable donation of Chinese family enterprises cannot ignore the role of Confucian culture.Under the above background,this paper takes the data of A-share family listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen of China from 2011 to 2020 as research samples to empirically test the influence of Confucian culture on charitable donations of family enterprises.The results show that:(1)Confucian culture has an obvious promoting effect on charitable donation of family enterprises;(2)Family enterprises under the influence of Confucian culture have a sense of social responsibility of "achieving good results and benefiting the world",that is,Confucian culture can encourage family enterprises with good performance to make more charitable donations;(3)Confucian culture can make up for the lack of market-oriented environment.When the marketization level of the family business is low,Confucian culture has a more significant role in promoting charitable donation.(4)Confucian culture can absorb the beneficial part of foreign culture,which shows that when the enterprise is in the open area,the Confucian culture will strengthen the promotion of charitable donation of family business;(5)Confucian culture promotes charitable donation of family enterprises by influencing family control preference and inhibiting the self-interested behavior of senior executives.The contributions of this paper are as follows: First,this study enriches our cognition and understanding of the causes of corporate charitable giving and provides direct evidence for understanding the cultural factors behind charitable giving in family businesses.Secondly,this paper expands and enriches the unique explanatory logic of relevant theories in the Chinese Confucian cultural tradition,and broadens the research horizon of social emotional wealth theory and butler theory.At the same time,this paper verifies the application situation of Confucian culture to charitable donations of family enterprises,which is helpful to understand the influence of Confucian culture in hierarchical classification.Finally,the research results of this paper affirm the positive influence of Confucian culture on charitable giving,help us to strengthen our cultural confidence,play the important function of Chinese excellent traditional culture in promoting the third distribution and the fulfillment of corporate social responsibility under the background of common prosperity,and have certain implications for the design of relevant government systems.