lucent fired four senior executives in china last april for the reason that they violated FCPA (read a news report). although it is believed that doing business in china eventually leads you to dirty things (read this), like various forms of bribing or something worse than that, there are still some who keep a higher standard of business ethics, many of them are american firms. lucent is one, and after reading an article, i think wal-mart is another.
the article compares wal-mart with an european retail giant in china. the european retail giant took advantages of the flaws of chinese law and opened more stores than wal-mart, and asked chinese suppliers to pay all kinds of "sponsorship fee" to get shelf space, the "sponsorship fee" takes a big percentage of the retail giant's revenue, on the contrary, wal-mart follows the chinese law and puts such slogans on the wall of its purchasing office - “no bribes from suppliers allowed”. no surprise, the european retail giant is fat while wal-mart is still trying to reach the break-even point. the author concludes that high standards of business ethics sacrifices business growth in china market, at least from a short-term perspective. the author continues to analyze what will happen over the long run, he doesn't have an answer, but he hints that wal-mart will be the winner in the future.
i am not saying that american multinationals are flawless, actually their standard of business ethics is lower than they are back at home, but still it's better than most chinese firms and some european/japanese multinationals.
the sad thing is this, due to its market dominance, the european retail giant's "sponsorship fee" becomes a sort of industry standard. the bad guy becomes powerful and the powerful guy rules the world.