A code nobody has read to the supplier is a document, not a control. The difference shows up in exactly one place: an audit.
What actually happens to a code of conduct
It is emailed as an English PDF attached to a purchase order. The sales contact who receives it needs the order, does not read English legal text, and correctly judges that signing is faster than asking. It comes back scanned and chopped within a day, which everyone reads as cooperation. Nobody in production has ever seen it.
Two years later a customer or an auditor asks how the code was communicated, in what language, and to whom. There is no answer, because nothing happened. The document is genuine and the process behind it is empty, and it is the process that was the point.
What we do instead
Working Mandarin, not literal Mandarin
Translated so a production manager can act on it. Abstract obligations rendered as the concrete practices they actually describe.
Briefed to management
A live session with people who can commit the factory — not an attachment to a sales contact. In person where the supplier is inside the Zhejiang belt.
Questions recorded, not smoothed over
Everything they asked, qualified or pushed back on, captured verbatim and translated. Objections are findings.
Acknowledgement with a trail
Signed and chopped acknowledgement, plus who attended, when, in what language, and what was covered.
Where we stop
We do not write the code. A policy that two parties will sign is a document with legal consequences, and drafting one is not consultancy work — see what we don’t do. If you do not yet have a code, the sensible order is to have counsel or your customer’s programme supply the text, and then bring us in to make it land.
We also do not audit against it. Establishing whether a factory does what the code requires is an accredited social-audit exercise, and we are not an accredited body. What we can do afterwards is put specific evidence requests to the supplier and record the answers — that is the compliance requirement briefing.