Issues On The Boundary Of Corporate Responsibility In China’s Public Health Emergencies And Suggestions For Legal Improvement

Based on the theoretical framework of the "government-market-society" triad,the article divides the responsibility of enterprises into internal and external responsibilities.The internal responsibility is the economic responsibility of enterprises,i.e.,the responsibility to shareholders,and the responsibility to maximize the interests of shareholders;the external responsibility is the responsibility of enterprises to workers,consumers and the environment,including both legally compulsory corporate responsibility(i.e.,legal responsibility)and non-legally compulsory corporate responsibility,which is the social responsibility in a broad sense.In the narrow sense,the social responsibility of enterprises only includes the social responsibility that is not legally compulsory.The social responsibility discussed in the article is limited to the social responsibility in the narrow sense.The division between legal responsibility and social responsibility discussed in the article is in fact to solve the problem of where to set the standards and boundaries of legally compulsory CSR,that is,how to judge which responsibilities belong to CSR that need to rely on state compulsion;and which other social responsibilities,which enterprises only have moral obligations,should not mechanically rely on state compulsion,but are suitable to be realized by means of spiritual The article finds that Chinese enterprises have a moral obligation to fulfill their social responsibility.Based on this premise,the article finds that Chinese companies actually bear important responsibilities in public health emergencies,including social responsibilities characterized by morality and legal responsibilities characterized by coercion.Although the central and local crisis governance based on laws and policies has played a positive role for enterprises to effectively fulfill their legal and social responsibilities,due to the contingency and temporary nature of law and policy formulation,some of the legal and policy provisions still have unreasonable,unscientific,or even illegal configurations of enterprises’ legal and social responsibilities,which seriously affect the interests of enterprises.For this reason,it is necessary to further clarify the boundaries of corporate legal and social responsibilities in order to bring the configuration of corporate legal and social responsibilities back to rationality.To address the above issues,the thesis firstly reviews the key laws,administrative regulations and relevant normative documents applicable to the adjustment of legal relations in the New Crown Pneumonia epidemic,and finds that there are problems of improper delineation of the boundaries of corporate social responsibility and legal responsibility in China in the field of labor law with regard to wages and the survival of labor relations,in the field of consumer market with regard to counterfeiting and price inflation,and in the field of environmental protection with regard to environmental enforcement For example,the policy requires enterprises to take on responsibilities that are not in accordance with the law.For example,the contradiction between the policy requiring enterprises to undertake the obligation of not laying off employees and paying wages and the enterprises’ own survival pressure,the contradiction between the enterprises’ price increase due to cost increase and the state’s strengthening of regulation to maintain the economic order during the epidemic,and the contradiction between the sentencing scale and enforcement intensity of counterfeiting and environmental law enforcement.Based on the comparison of the division of corporate legal and social responsibilities in the fields of labor and environmental law in some foreign countries such as the United States in the context of the new pneumonia epidemic,the article identifies the non-referenceable aspects of the foreign experience(e.g.,the U.S.approach based on a large fiscal and monetary expenditure system is difficult to be used in China)and the reference points(e.g.,the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to guide corporate compliance,Japan’s approach to The article also discusses what can be learned from the U.S.Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to corporate compliance and Japan’s unified national legislation aimed at safeguarding social order and stability.)Based on this,the article makes preliminary suggestions on the delineation of the boundaries between social and legal responsibilities of Chinese enterprises,suggesting that the setting of legal responsibilities of enterprises in public health emergencies should take into account the enterprises’ own affordability and social institutional factors,and use "legitimacy of purpose" and "clarity of authorization" as the basis for the allocation of legal rights and obligations of enterprises."The article also suggests that the boundary of responsibility between enterprises and the government should be clarified,and the administrative regulations of the Public Health Emergency Response Regulations should be elevated to law and supplemented with special provisions to improve the institutional structure of enterprises’ legal responsibility.At the same time,the article suggests to strengthen the endogenous motivation of enterprises to fulfill their social responsibility by constructing an incentive mechanism for CSR in different fields and formulating CSR guidelines during epidemics.