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This paper aims to examine the effect of self-reflection on employee creativity in China. The authors identify individual intellectual capital (IIC) as a mediator and concerns for face as a moderator for this relationship.

A sample of 351 dyads of full-time employees and their immediate supervisors from various Chinese companies were surveyed. Regression analysis and structural equation modeling were used to test the research model.

Three dimensions of self-reflection significantly affect IIC and subsequently lead to employee creativity; IIC mediates the relationship between three dimensions of self-reflection and employee creativity; concern for face negatively moderates the effect of IIC on employee creativity.

Managers can facilitate employees’ creativity by motivating them to conduct self-reflection and develop IIC, and by nurturing a safe atmosphere that allows individuals to take risks without losing face.

This is one of the first empirical studies to investigate the mediating effects of IIC and the moderating effects of concerns for face on the relationship between self-reflection and creativity.

This paper aims to examine how leaders’ avoidance influences followers’ attitudes and well-being in China. Although conflict avoidance is one of the most commonly used conflict resolution styles in China, there has surprisingly been no explicit investigation of the effects of leaders’ avoidance.

Data were collected from 245 subordinates in three large companies in the People’s Republic of China through an online survey. Multiple regression analysis was adopted to test three sets of competing hypotheses.

Leaders’ avoidance behavior is positively related to followers’ perception of justice, supervisory trust and emotional well-being in Chinese organizations.

This paper joins growing attempts to consider conflict management in the context of leadership. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine empirically the relationships between a team leader’s avoidance behavior and his or her subordinates’ perceptions of justice, supervisory trust and emotional well-being in a single study. The findings are provoking by illustrating positive effect of leader’s conflict avoidance behavior in China. This paper supports that conflict avoidance could be a sustainable rather than one-off strategy by a leader, and that identifying conditions (e.g. culture) that affect the outcomes of conflict avoidance is important.

The aim of this article is two-fold. First, it offers a unique account of San Min, the prototype of the current Chinese educational principle proposed by Yan Fu (1854–1921) that aimed at improving people’s physical, intellectual and moral capacities. This system of educational thinking has received only marginal attention in Anglophone research literature. Second, given the influence of Yan Fu’s interpretation and promulgation of Herbert Spencer’s educational philosophy during that period, it investigates the extent to which San Min is derived from Spencer’s educational thought (the “Spencerian Triad”). This article focusses on how Yan Fu adapted the ideas of San Min from Spencer’s account.

This article considers Yan Fu’s principle of San Min in relation to Spencer’s educational triad through a close reading and comparison of key primary texts (including Yan Fu’s original writing). It explores the similarities and differences between each account of education’s goals and its proposed means of attainment.

Yan Fu’s principle of San Min is shown to have been adapted from the Spencerian Triad. However, using the theory of Social Organism, Yan Fu re-interpreted Spencer’s individual liberty as liberty for the nation. While Spencer’s goal was to empower individuals, Yan Fu aimed to serve collective independence, wealth and power.

This article addresses oversights concerning San Min’s Western origins in the Spencerian Triad and its influence on Chinese education under Yan Fu’s sway. It is significant because San Min is still at the core of the current Chinese educational policy.

China’s swift economic rise, as symbolized by the first Chinese Olympics and by surpassing Japan to become the world’s second largest economy despite the recent global financial meltdown, has been accompanied by a transformation of Chinese foreign policy behavior. After spending the last decade emphasizing China’s “peaceful rise” or “peaceful development,” Beijing has begun to expound its policy preferences and territorial claims more forthrightly, even assertively. The purpose of this chapter will be to consider the origins, consequences, and likely future of the new Chinese foreign policy in the wake of the leadership transition at the 18th Party Congress in 2012 and the 12th National People’s Congress in 2013.

There are some notable ethical problems about role obligations, including the three prominent issues of role relativism, role definition, and role identification. The first is the problem to what extent roles may create duties or rights at odds with other moral requirements, the second is where roles are unclear or conflicting in what they prescribe, and the third is about the extent to which people commit themselves to their roles, or dissociate themselves from those roles. The three problems are significant in business ethics. A Confucian approach to roles can assist in dealing with them. Classical texts suggest a nuanced approach to roles, which allows greater flexibility, paying attention to context and detailed circumstances, always relating role prescriptions to respect and concern for other people, and emphasizing the importance of sincerity and authenticity in role performance. Such an account is consistent with virtue ethics approaches to business ethics.

This chapter aims to examine the introduction and development of the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) within a Chinese social, cultural, and political context. It mainly looks at the CSR movement in China in order to explain how the traditional values of Confucianism contributed to the development of CSR discourse which is similar to and differs from some other countries in North America and Europe.

The chapter is primarily theoretical in perspective. It also adopts a discourse approach, specifically Fairclough’s three-step approach by drawing upon a large state-owned corporate group’s website documents and interview data in order to create new meanings of Chinese CSR shaped by Confucian moral philosophy.

The chapter argues that development of Chinese CSR theory incorporates a revival of Confucian moral philosophy into modern Western business management philosophy. It demonstrates a hybrid model for CSR practices which combine aspects of both Confucian business ethics and Western CSR theory.

The research results are valid for state-owned enterprises and may not be generalized to other types of Chinese businesses such as private-owned enterprises and small business enterprises. Further research is needed to develop comparisons.

The chapter suggests a people-oriented leadership style which emphasizes the importance of people in the organization and is proven to be successful in the improvement of employee well-being and organizational productivity.

The originality of introducing interview data offers a benchmark for the study of CSR discourse in Chinese context. The chapter also provides a guide for business managers to design the strategies based on their own countries’ cultural, political, social, and institutional framework.

This special issue aims to address the complexities and dynamics in contemporary China’s citizen-making processes, with a focus on the educational dimension.

The four articles in this special issue present citizen-making processes in both educational and cultural arenas. Based on the rich, first-hand data collected inside and outside China, the researchers revealed the dynamics of the educative processes, as the interplay of different mechanisms produces new understandings of citizenship practice.

This special issue sheds light on the rise of new types of citizens, who are emerging at the grassroots level in China, beyond the state’s strict direct regulations, along with the rise of market forces and multicultural communities in Chinese society today. Contributors to this special issue have captured an ongoing change, in that the diversified citizen-making mechanisms are, to a certain extent, mitigating the party-state’s definitive monopoly on forging citizens and are creating new spaces for individuals to develop fresh forms of political subjectivity and citizenship practice. In this sense, we argue for the unpacking of the citizen-making processes in present-day China not only from the lens of state-dominated, top-down initiatives but also from that of participatory, bottom-up initiatives performed by grassroots groups with differentiated socio-economic statuses and cultural traditions.

This special issue can be regarded as a contribution to the growing field of Chinese citizenship studies, which constitutes an integral part of the unfinished project of citizenship after orientalism.