This study challenges democratic citizenship theory by examining altruistic behaviour in authoritarian China. We find that financial resources influence prosocial engagement primarily through psychological mediators such as long-term planning and self-discovery, rather than directly providing material means for participation. Communist Party membership shapes specific domestic ideological orientations, but not attitudes toward market regulation or income equality, while cultural tradition emerges as a stronger predictor of certain political attitudes than party affiliation. Cluster analysis identifies three distinct citizen profiles: (1) future-oriented altruists; (2) status-driven contributors; and, (3) short-termpragmatists, revealing motivational heterogeneity within authoritarian publics. These findings suggest that authoritarian citizenship operates through psychological mediation and plural motivational pathways fundamentally different from democratic societies, with potential applicability to other single-party regimes where states actively structure prosocial behaviour. The study contributes to comparative authoritarianism literature by theorizing how regime type moderates the relationship between socio-economic resources, political identity, and civic engagement.

Using hand-collected data on siblings of chairpersons in Chinese family firms, we examine the impact of the chairperson having siblings on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of their firm. The findings suggest that when a firm has a siblings-chairperson, the firm has a better CSR rating than firms with a chairperson without siblings. Specifically, a firm with a siblings- chairperson, on average, has a CSR rating approximately 7.96% higher than a median firm’s rating. The conclusions are robust to a battery of robustness checks including a regression discontinuity research design, alternative measures of CSR, a propensity score matching sample, placebo tests, and different estimation methods. Additional analysis suggests that the mechanisms behind siblings and CSR are consistent with both competition and altruistic effects among siblings. Further analysis suggests that the positive impact of a siblings-chairperson on the CSR rating of firms is more salient when the local familism culture is stronger, when government official career advancement incentives are lower, or when the siblings are directors or CEOs of other firms. Finally, firms with a siblings-chairperson are also pro-shareholder because they consume less perquisites than firms without a siblings-chairperson. Collectively, the findings are consistent with the notion that, by having at least one sibling, a chairperson is more competitive and altruistic than a chairperson without siblings, and such behavior enhances CSR. Family structure matters in corporate practices.