Abstract: What is the logic of the charitable donation behaviors of Chinese state-owned enterprises? What kind of SOEs will make more active donations? Based on the data of 975 Chinese listed SOEs during the period of 2010-2016, this paper empirically investigates the influence of SOEs’ affiliation level and government subsidies on their charitable donations, as well as the moderating effects of political connection and government intervention. The results show that firstly, the affiliation level of SOEs is negatively correlated with their charitable donations, the local SOEs at the lower level will donate more because of their higher level of embeddedness and reliance on the localities; secondly, the government subsidies obtained by SOEs are positively related to their donations, and donations have become a way for SOEs to feed back to the government. In addition, as the political connections of corporate management and the intervention level of the local government will enhance SOE’s local embeddedness and needs for feedback, both of the two will positively adjust the above relationships. Finally, through further investigations of such factors as institutional pressure that SOEs are faced, social expectations, and so on, it is also verified that the donation decision-making of SOEs is following the two behavioral logics: embedding and feedback.

Key words: state owned enterprise; charitable donation; affiliation level; governmental subsidy; embeddedness