THE BUDDHIST AND CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVES ON BUSINESS ETHICS IN LEADING CHINESE BUSINESS PRACTICES

Abstract

The religious practices of ethnic Chinese business leaders make an interesting debate for exploring how leadership, ethics and perspective are seen because of the sharp distinction made between ‘before’ and ‘after’. Business ethics applied to economics and business has a long tradition. While Buddhism focuses on experientially based ethical consciousness to develop the business with self-responsibility, Christian faith and reason intertwine to bring about principles, criteria, and guidelines for action and a set of virtues with relevance for business activity. Therefore, we then examine how such religious practices in both Buddhist and Christian improve their business leadership with related human values embedded strongly in terms of an old (conservative) and new (rebirth/born again) personhood and they do so within a challenging, highly corrupt and business context. This article introduces Buddhist and Christian ethics to show how these religious practices discursively deconstruct their ‘old’ identities and construct their ‘new’ aspirational identities to expand ethical understanding and practice in Chinese business. Since research on ethnic Chinese business typically investigates the dominance attributed to specific ‘Chinese’ cultural values and strong intra-ethnic network, this paper provides different perspectives in order to make its contribution to the developments of both Buddhist and Christian ethics in the leading Chinese business practices as an ‘enhancer’ to increase expression in good business conduct.

Keywords

• chinese business
• business ethics
• buddhist
• christian
• human values