Companies and organizations have received recognition from the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai for their continued push towards higher corporate social responsibility standards in China.
The day-long corporate citizenship event held on October 30, 2008 included speakers like Shirley Yu Tsui, IBM's vice president of strategy and business development for Greater China, who discussed the role corporate citizenship plays in the development of global strategy at a major corporation, and Steven Xu, The Economist Group's chief representative in China and director of China advisory services for the Economist Intelligence Unit. Xu presented his recent research on how CSR is impacted by transformations of China's consumer markets, financial markets and social welfare.
AmCham's partnership award recognized bonds between companies and social organizations and this year the honor went to FedEx and Orbis for their work in promoting education and training for the treatment of preventable blindness in China. The overall CSR award for small and medium businesses went to PMI Shanghai International Trading for its efforts in compliance, audit, and environmental initiatives. The CSR award for large multinationals had finalists such as Cargill, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Nike, and Timken, and the top winner in that category was Intel.
Special recognition awards also went to the Shanghai Pudong Development Bank in the non-foreign invested enterprise category and a sustainable community development honor went to a partnership between Tecsun and Changjiang Civilian Education Foundation.
This is the fourth year that the awards have taken place and they recognize the best sustainability initiatives undertaken in the past year by both domestic and multinational businesses operating in China. With the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai being the largest chamber of commerce of all the chambers operating in Asia, the award carries special weight in the region. Judges for this year's awards included Bill Valentino, vice president of corporate social responsibility in China for Bayer; Danny Levinson, CEO of BDL Media Ltd and publisher of ChinaCSR.com; Thomas Gwyn from Paul Hastings; Li Zhiqiang, an academic from the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong; Victoria Moy from the Global Cargo Network; Sue Bishop of the University of Nottingham Ningbo, China; and Diane Long of Unison International chaired the jury.
