Beyond Shareholder Wealth Maximisation ─ Towards a More Suitable Corporate Objective for Chinese Companies

Corporate governance has become one of the most important issues on the business agenda, with incalculable political and social consequences both domestically and globally. The corporate objective, or for whose interests should a company be run, remains the fundamental question at the heart of corporate governance.

This book explores different approaches to the corporate objective and then goes on to discuss these approaches in the context of China due to its importance in the global economic and political arena. The book puts forward a comparative study of shareholder rights in the UK, US in order to determine what is and should be the corporate objective for Chinese companies. Contrary to the widely held belief that corporate objective should be shareholder wealth maximisation (SWM), Min Yan argues that SWM is both descriptively and normatively unsuitable and not just for China, but for Western economies as well. The book goes on to advocate a stakeholder model as the basis for Chinese corporate law and corporate governance.

Min Yan is a Lecturer in Business Law and the Director of the BSc Business with Law Programme at the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London, UK. His research interests are generally in the fields of corporate law, corporate governance and comparative business law studies.