The good intentions of corporations are on a collision course with China.
Several of the West’s largest corporations are sponsoring the Olympics in a country whose government the U.S., Canada and several European countries say is engaged in genocide. The sponsors include active proponents of political rights at home and model corporate citizens, according to environmental, social and governance rating agencies. What were they thinking?
Probably that it was business-as-usual. Most multinationals, their investors, their corporate social responsibility departments, and even the ESG companies rating them grew up in a world with a certain set of convenient assumptions about China: fast-growing and politically intolerant, but with a political culture and institutions that would become more like the democratic West as it grew wealthier. And…
