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Amidst the rapid development of the global digital economy, digital transformation has become a strategic choice that firms must use to respond to the changing times. This study analyzes the impact of digital transformation on corporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance.

This study analyzes the impact of digital transformation on corporate ESG performance.

Using panel data from Chinese A-share-listed companies from 2010 to 2019, the authors found that digital transformation has a positive impact on corporate ESG performance, especially for high-tech firms and state-owned firms. In particular, the authors find that the digital production and digital marketing exert a positive effect on corporate ESG performance. Mechanism tests showed that digital transformation helps promote corporate green innovation, improve information transparency and improve corporate governance, thus enhancing ESG performance. A moderating effect analysis revealed that the positive impact of digital transformation on ESG performance is more significant in firms with government subsidies and chief executive officers (CEOs) with rich career experience.

Most existing research has confirmed the positive effect of digital transformation on firms' financial performance, whereas fewer studies have focused on the impact of digital transformation on the non-financial performance of firms.

Mao Zedong was the representative figure in the Sinicisation of Marxism. At the beginning of the May 4th Movement, he advocated promoting the transformation of society by proceeding from the actualities of China and inheriting critically the legacy of Chinese and Western cultures. After he became a Marxist, he firmly resisted the tendency towards divination of the directives of the Communist International, and the Soviet experience of revolution, and tried hard to integrate the universal principles of Marxism with Chinese culture and Chinese revolutionary practice, thus opening up the way to the revolution in 1949. However, after the founding of the New China he patterned the economic construction on the Soviet model, and stressed criticism of the culture of the bourgeois, but dropped his guard against the pernicious influences of feudal society; so the historical sediment of the feudal culture became thicker and thicker under cover of Marxism, and finally there occurred the historical tragedy of the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Great Cultural Revolution”. The Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party repudiated the theoretical basis of the “Great Cultural Revolution” and brought in a new phase of political restructuring and cultural openness. The author holds that the evolution of Mao Zedong′s concept of Chinese and Western cultures should be studied and summarised, so that lessons may be drawn from it for the building of a socialist spiritual civilisation.