Corporate Tax, Tax Avoidance, and CSR: The Ideology of China

China’s socialist market economy with Chinese characteristics has led more and more people and scholars to subscribe to the voluntary exchange theory which is prevalent in the West. That is to say, people pay taxes expecting the right in return to enjoy high-quality public goods. In 2005, the Company Law in China was revised and corporate social responsibility (CSR) was explicitly written in Article 5 of the law. All conducts of businesses must abide by the law and bear social responsibility. In 2008, the Corporate Income Tax Law in China was also amended. The direction of the law has made the payment of corporate tax to incline more toward an obligatory nature rather than a social exchange nature. The recent ebbs and flows of China’s national affairs such as the “New Cold War” and the Belt and Road Initiative vis-à-vis the worldwide focus on sustainability and geopolitics have led us to rethink many aspects of global divergence as well as convergence. In this chapter, we attempt to look into whether paying taxes is considered a CSR activity and whether tax avoidance is a CSIR (corporate social irresponsibility) from the Chinese perspective. Selected company reports of state-owned enterprises, private enterprises, and foreign-invested enterprises’ narratives on their corporate tax and CSR matters were also analysed under China’s special social, political, and economic environments.