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It has been said that one of the main achievements of the international community is the establishment of soft law mechanisms in the form of guiding principles in order to ensure that Multinational Companies (MNCs) balance their profit oriented activities with non lucrative goals that are equally important and could even be considered more relevant in the long term. Indeed, short term gains should not have negative effects on other concerns such as the protection of the environment where the activities are taking place specially when the latters are of hazardous nature as well as ensuring the respect of human rights by securing for instance the safety of workers or prohibiting child labor and so on. In this chapter “Multinational Corporations and Corporate Social Responsibility in a Chinese Context: An International Perspective,” the author Angelica Bonfanti examined the principal notions through which companies are held accountable in the way they conduct their activities. In fact, almost every MNC, nowadays, have embraced the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) that is firmly established through the multiple existing international instruments and guiding principles. Not only are these companies including such standards in their day to day operations, but also many of them have actually started using this concept as a marketing strategy to gain public support in a given territory, so that the company could gain profits by conducting its operations in the targeted country. As a matter of fact, one could easily say that the concept of CSR has become an industry by itself where companies try to excel either for publicity purposes or because the MNCs are really convinced of the need to take into consideration other concerns that are equally important. Regardless of the main reason for which a given company is embracing such principles, what matters is the fact that in practice and in plenty of places, the application of the principle of CSR has really contributed to creating the suggested change in the communities where the operations are being conducted. However, it is not sufficient to simply promote the concept of CSR in the international sphere as on one hand some companies would prefer not to embrace such notions and on the other, even in the case of respecting the principle, accidents may happen and as such there will be a need to demine the liable party for ensuring reparation to the victims or the state depending on the kind of harm that is inflicted. For this reason, the concept of Corporate Accountability (CA) has been introduced to ensure that corporations are being properly monitored in particular from the State itself. Nevertheless, in this case, a State has the responsibility of developing proper domestic laws and regulations as the MNCs in case of damage inflicted will be sued before national jurisdictions where the existence of sophisticated and up to date national rules is essential for securing a fair compensation depending on the kind of harm that was caused as a result of the operations. Thus, ensuring the existence of both CSR and CA is essential for conducting operations in any country looking to balance economic and noneconomic interests.
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