The Emergence of Stand-Alone Social and Environmental Reporting in Mainland China: An Exploratory Research Note

Despite the increasing prominence of China1 in the world economy and its importance socially and environmentally, there is still relatively little English-language research into social and environmental disclosure by Chinese companies. This paper has the explicitly modest intention of reviewing and extending the extant literature and offering additional descriptive data about Chinese stand-alone social and environmental reports. There is a range of inferences which appear to be counter-intuitive to Anglo-Saxon and European researchers and which will deserve further research.