Marginalizing the Law. Corporate Social Responsibility, Worker Hotlines and the Shifting Grounds of Rights Consciouness in Contemporary China

This chapter proposes to follow the entanglements of local terms such as "rights", "responsibility" and "citizenship" with the rise of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) paradigm in international arenas, a paradigm that has paradoxical consequences for the status and social uses of the law. It demonstrates how the transnational discourses of "responsibility" converge with local discourses that mobilize notions of "new citizenship" and "quality", sinicizing a potent global paradigm in particular ways. The chapter highlights one particular coming-together of the flows and shifts, in which socio-technologies employed under the rubric of "capacity building" for corporate social responsibility actually work to marginalize the law as an instrument for the pursuit of social justice in the area of working conditions in China. It also highlights the presence in China of a set of CSR discourses and practices that divert questions of social justice and rights consciousness away from the law and towards a nebulous ideal of "responsibility".