Comparative Analysis of Western and Chinese Methods of Managing Ethics and Sustainable Development in Business

This work is devoted to a comparison of two models for managing business ethics and sustainable development in Russian and Chinese businesses. Firstly, it’s important to note that the most common model of evaluating and managing sustainable development in business is ESG. Business ethics is an important element of the ESG system and can be included in each ESG section. Currently, ESG is one of the fundamental and leading trends for big business, as ESG performance shapes its image. The cradle of ESG development is the United States, which promoted the idea through the UN. We can say that all states in which business is developing in the ESG framework have adopted part of the American experience, but this happened in different ways. Accordingly, American management methods were taken as fundamental in the analysis. The first successor was the European Union, in which the Government took the initiative and development is still taking place according to the “top-down” principle. But the focus of this work is to compare other players: Russia and China. Russia and China began to develop within the framework of ESG at approximately the same time, but due to the characteristics of the regions and approaches to doing business, the experience is different. In Russia, development comes from business, that is, “from the bottom up,” the state learns from business, but in China, on the contrary, “from the bottom up,” submitting to the influence of the party. Both cases have their own unique characteristics, with both similarities and differences between the selected players. The goal of the work was to identify possible “free niches”, empty spaces in Russian business management methods that could be filled by the experience of the Chinese management model. To conduct a comparative analysis, the work took two large (the largest in the states in their niche) gold mining companies: Polyus in Russia and Shandong Gold Group in China. During the comparison of methods, the main differences were identified, including: differences in laws and regulations both in the state and in business, issues of intellectual property of business, the importance of the contribution of each employee to the common cause, etc. Thus, the results obtained were assessed for their application in Russian business. When they are applied, the Russian ESG picture will be enriched, and the company will have more opportunities for development. Using the example of such a business comparison, the cultural, social and economic characteristics of states and businesses were also demonstrated.