ABSTRACT
Today corporate governance has become the single most important issue on the business agenda with incalculable political and social consequences both domestically and globally. Despite decades of debate, there is no consensus regarding what the corporate objective is or ought to be. Shareholder wealth maximisation (SWM), or shareholder primacy, is generally viewed by most people in the Anglo-American legal sphere as the primary, if not the only, corporate objective, especially under the prevalent thought that "an organization should have a single valued objective". Many problems occur when SWM is given as the corporate objective. Stakeholder theory as a theory of the firm is intended to "explain and guide the structure and operation of the established corporation". However, there is little critical discussion in China about ultimate corporate objectives and SWM. The chapter also presents some of the key concepts of this book.
