Foreign Companies Operating In China, Business Ethics Research

Foreign-funded companies are an important component of China's economy, they have also been the vital driving force of china's gigantic economic success since its opening up. The entrance of foreign-funded companies into Chinese market has not only been accelerating the market economy reform, but has also brought about tons of advanced business and management ideas and concepts here, including the ideas of corporate ethics. However, recent years have witnessed the exposure of foreign-funded companies'violation of corporate ethics, as a result, a growing concern on foreign-funded companies'obeying corporate ethics in China took place.On the basis of reviewing and putting together relevant studies on companies'following ethical standards as well as the evaluation of company's corporate ethics, this study developed a questionnaire based on Zetzsche's corporate ethics evaluation model for employees working in foreign-funded companies, and utilized it in the survey of people working at foreign-funded companies in the city of Chongqing, Chengdu, Guiyang and Kunming. Through calculating and analyzing the results of the questionnaire survey, we found that:On the whole, Foreign-funded companies have been doing admirably well in following corporate ethics; from narrow perspectives, foreign companies'coming from different countries, of different scales or doing business in different areas in China are not doing equally well in corporate ethics; from the development trend, out of the expectation of doing well financially in Chinese market in the long run, foreign-funded companies tend to improve their corporate ethics.According to relevant studies and analysis of our survey results, this study discovers that many foreign companies'corporate ethics delinquencies manifest themselves in following aspects:①bribery,②environment pollution,③employees'mistreatment,④the inadequacy of the protection of customers'rights,⑤tax evasion and fraud,⑥he lack of participation in work for public good. Through careful analysis of these delinquencies, this study detects that the main causes of them are, from the market mechanism point of view, the asymmetry of market information, the malfunction of recessive incitement system, unethical competitions and negative reference of Chinese companies; from the social institution perspective, the lag of legal construction, the faultiness of property rights system, the imperfection of credit system and, the many problems in governments'administrative system; the not in place ethical regulations or its dysfunction; Employees'unconsciousness in corporate ethics; the one-way orientation of media attention, the faulty use of social media and the tendentiousness of public expectation. Based on the analysis of causes, this study brings forward the point that the improvement of foreign-funded companies'corporate ethics requires the composition of forces of four dimensions, which are the organization dimension, the legal dimension, the policy dimension and the social dimension. From the organization dimension, foreign companies ought to consolidate the building of an ethical corporate culture, filtering the ethical ideas into employees'minds through spreading and regularizing them. They also should clearly define the ethics-related responsibility of their internal members, and at the same time, build an ethical corporate image to win nice reputation; from the legal perspective, related parties should make sound business regulations, and bring ideas of corporate ethics into legal construction; from the policy dimension, the government should alter the way of attracting foreign investment, raise the bar of entering into Chinese market based on corporate ethics, and also utilize administrative means in pressing corporate ethics on foreign-funded companies; from the social point of view, the public, NGOs and NFOs' functions in supervising corporate conducts should be strengthened, and besides, medias' positive reports should also work for activating companies' ethical behaviors.