Archives of Peking University News - PKU English - 北京大学

北京大学英语新闻网/Peking University News
interested parties, the report should be regarded as prepared for those who take an
interest in the corporation, rather than merely for a certain group or individual. That
means the report must answer to what the interested parties might be interested in.
Secondly, the report should be written according to a basically identical model. Quite
a number of organizations have proposed their own versions of writing principles,
among them Transparency, Objectivity, Completeness, Precision and Feasibility
could be taken as the core criteria. Thirdly, there is no reason to dodge real
problems. Some of the CSR reports released by certain foreign corporations only
dwell on their achievements. Some of the recent CSR reports by certain famous
multinational corporations have already become useless because of their
concealment or incomplete disclosure of CSR-related contents.
China Reading Weekly: In the third aspect, supervision from the media seems very
important.
Liu Peng: That‘s true. Usually it is the government that regulates corporations‘ CSR
by laws and policies to make sure that the corporations are undertaking their CSR in
a legal and justified way, and intensify CSR undertaking through encouragement and
incentives. However, since a great part of the CSR lies beyond the state laws and
policies, it is not the government but the news media to act as a supervisor of
corporations‘ CSR activities. On the one hand, the media could create a powerful
force from the public opinion by disclosing and criticizing failures in CSR. On the
other, the media could heighten CSR awareness among corporations and in the
society by publicizing CSR ideas and successful CSR cases to pave the way for
CSR progress.
Recently, Chinese media has shown an increasing interest in CSR. According to
preliminary statistics, there were all together 1,123 news reports on CSR in ―China
Key Newspapers Database‖, 14.2 times higher than that in 2000. Also in 2006, there
was a wide coverage of serious CSR failures in China, including incidents related to
exploited workers for Foxconn, trade unions in some foreign-funded companies,
duck eggs with carcinogenic Sudan Red, turbot fish with drug residues and SK-Ⅱ
scandal and so on. In this way, the awareness of social responsibility was greatly
raised.
China Reading Weekly: Promotion of CSR needs combined efforts. Besides the
government guidance, corporations‘ self-motivation and public opinion, needn‘t the
public ―requirements‖ also be strengthened?
Liu Peng: The international CSR campaign originated from the consumers‘ boycott of
corporations that failed to fulfill CSR. During the peak of this campaign, which was
started in the 1980s, the consumers‘ participation and pressure played a vital role. It
could be concluded that, without the devotion of the consumers and the consumers‘
organizations, CSR would not have reached its momentum and influence as we see
547