Confucian Ethics of Righteousness and Profit Drive Hong Kong’s Oldest Firms

Long before the phrase corporate social responsibility entered the business vocabulary, some of Hong Kong’s oldest companies were already doing good. A new ethnographic study argues that these time-honoured businesses, known in Chinese as laozihao, have practiced a distinctly Chinese form of social responsibility for more than a century, guided not by Western management theory but by a Confucian moral principle called yi-li tongyi, the unity of righteousness and profit. The research, published in the International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, draws on archival records and fieldwork conducted among twelve long-established firms in Hong Kong between January 2025 and May 2026, and it challenges the assumption that socially responsible business conduct is a modern, Western import.

The study’s author, Chong Gao of Hong Kong Shue Yan University, situates the work within the anthropology of corporate social responsibility, a subfield that emerged in the 2000s when researchers began using ethnographic methods to examine how multinational corporations interact with local communities. Earlier anthropological studies of CSR tended to focus on transnational giants such as Coca-Cola and large mining companies, often revealing uncomfortable dynamics. Ethnographies of CSR programs run by an Israeli Coca-Cola franchise and by a transnational mining firm in South Africa showed that such initiatives could serve as vehicles for extending corporate power, securing reputations, and creating local dependence rather than genuine mutual benefit. By concentrating almost exclusively on multinationals, however, this body of work left little room to ask whether local firms in non-Western societies might have developed their own, endogenous ways of contributing to social good.

Gao’s answer is that many of them did, and that the key lies in a debate that has run through Chinese philosophy for more than two thousand years. The tension between yi, meaning righteousness or moral duty, and li, meaning profit or material benefit, traces back to Confucius and Mencius. Over the centuries, this debate produced several possible resolutions, including harnessing the desire for economic gain with righteousness, valuing righteousness above wealth, and abandoning personal interest altogether. The version that matters for business, yi-li tongyi, holds that righteousness and profit are not opponents but partners: making money in a moral way, and doing moral good in a way that sustains the business, are two sides of the same conduct. During the late Qing dynasty, when China faced pressure to build modern industry capable of competing with Western firms, this idea was recast so that developing national commercial strength through ethical means was itself defined as a form of righteousness.

The historical evidence assembled in the study spans three distinct eras of Hong Kong’s economic development. In the earliest period, from the 1850s to the 1940s, waves of migrants from the Pearl River Delta, and later from Shanghai and eastern China, arrived in a colony marked by hardship, plague, and war. Firms responded with what the study describes as mutual support in an era of hardship. Yuen Kut Lam, a medicine shop founded in 1892 in Foshan, donated its herbal ganhe tea to residents facing a plague outbreak in 1898 and has continued to offer free medical tea in Hong Kong since opening a branch there in 1906. The company’s stated philosophy, half for charity and half for business, is presented as a textbook expression of yi-li unity: the goal is not profit maximization but a balance between social benefit and commercial survival.

Food companies followed a similar logic. Garden, established in 1926, produced affordable high-nutrition biscuits in the 1930s that let lower-income families buy what had been expensive imported luxuries, manufactured compressed biscuits for the Hong Kong government during World War II, and launched its vitamin-fortified Life Bread in 1960 to combat malnutrition among the poor. Vitasoy, founded in 1940 by Dr. Lo Kwee-Seong, grew out of efforts to teach refugees to make soy milk as a cheap, nutritious alternative to unaffordable milk during a period of food shortage. Perhaps most striking is the wartime story of Tai Ping Koon Restaurant, a Western-style establishment opened in Guangzhou in 1860 and relocated to Hong Kong in 1938 ahead of the Japanese invasion. According to the restaurant’s fifth-generation managing director, refugees from Guangzhou used the restaurant as a meeting point and information exchange, gathering there to share news of the war and the welfare of relatives in an era when telephones were rare. The patronage of these customers helped the restaurant profit, while the space it provided helped a displaced community rebuild its networks, a reciprocity that benefited both sides.

The second wave, from the 1950s to the 1980s, coincided with Hong Kong’s industrialization and economic take-off, when settled migrants began constructing a local identity. Here the study shows laozihao businesses embedding themselves in community formation and cultural preservation. Teahouses such as Luk Yu Tea House, opened in 1933, became gathering places for merchants and, more broadly, custodians of Cantonese yum cha culture. The Xin Longcheng teahouse, a village-based establishment founded in 1959, functioned as an informal community canteen where elderly residents, market vendors, and bird-keepers met daily; its manager described regular customers who let themselves into the outdoor seating area, found the tea leaves, and poured their own cups before the staff arrived. The study interprets such teahouses as third places, social settings beyond home and work that foster community cohesion, and argues that their commercial activity is inseparable from the social services they quietly provide.

Traditional bakeries played a comparable cultural role. Tai Tung Bakery, established in 1943, has sold mooncakes on a twelve-month instalment plan through its Mooncake Club since the 1940s, easing the financial burden on grassroots families who needed the cakes for Mid-Autumn Festival gift exchange while securing a loyal customer base. The same shops, including Kee Wah Bakery and Hang Heung Cake Shop, both founded in 1938, preserve the complicated knowledge surrounding bridal pastries for the traditional betrothal ceremony known as guo da li, and even rent out the specialized containers required for the occasion. Tai Tung’s practice of installing a large festival flower plaque each Mid-Autumn Festival, the study notes, was justified by its second-generation owner as a way of giving the Yuen Long district a distinct identity. None of these firms used the language of CSR, which only became widespread in the 1990s; the moral vocabulary they drew on was the unity of righteousness and profit.

The third wave, from the 1990s to the present, features a younger, better-educated generation of owners who link the inherited principle to contemporary issues. Pat Sin Bakery, founded in 1965, distributes free pastries to senior citizens twice a month, and staff discreetly exceed the nominal quota of one hundred sets rather than turn away latecomers, an attention to elderly feelings that earned the shop a Good Shop Award in 2025. Wong Wing Kee Preserved Fruits Factory, established in 1901, partners with a social enterprise to bring its nostalgic products into nursing homes as memory stimulants for the aged. Sang Kee Restaurant works with NGOs on donations to the disabled, the elderly, and people in pandemic quarantine, while Man Fung Noodle Shop donates unsold but edible food, including Lunar New Year cakes, to a nonprofit restaurant that delivers them to families in need. These collaborations with social enterprises, charities, and NGOs, the study argues, show that a Confucian-era concept retains the vitality to generate social value in a modern socioeconomic environment.

The theoretical stakes of the argument are considerable. Western CSR discourse, from Bowen’s 1953 work through Friedman’s famous 1970 claim that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, frames social responsibility largely in terms of obligations arising from harm, compensation, and stakeholder management. Yi-li tongyi frames doing good differently: helping the community, employees, and fellow townsmen is not a duty separate from profit-making but its moral counterpart, embedded in the everyday conduct of the firm. Gao suggests that this principle functions as the core of an endogenous corporate culture, and possibly as a longevity gene that explains why some laozihao firms have survived more than a century while most competitors failed. The practical implication is equally pointed: companies seeking to make genuine social contributions may achieve more cultural legitimacy by mobilizing their own moral traditions than by copying CSR templates designed by and for Western multinationals. Comparative studies of how different business traditions balance social purpose and profit, the study concludes, are needed to understand the full range of relationships between firms and the societies that sustain them.

Subject of Research: An ethnographic study of how Hong Kong's time-honoured businesses practice social responsibility through the Confucian principle of unity of righteousness and profit.

Article Title: Understanding social responsibility of Hong Kong’s time-honoured business through the lens of yi-li unity

Article References: Gao, C. (2026). Understanding social responsibility of Hong Kong’s time-honoured business through the lens of yi-li unity. International Journal of Anthropology and Ethnology, 10(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-026-00164-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s41257-026-00164-y

Keywords: corporate social responsibility, laozihao, Confucianism, yi-li unity, Hong Kong, time-honoured business, business anthropology, corporate culture, social good, business longevity, ethnography, Chinese business ethics