A coalition of Chinese NGOs allied with the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) periodically ranks tech companies on their environmental and human rights performance in China. The fourth such ranking contains some surprises.

This latest report ranks 29 companies' performance against 10 criteria. The top quartile consists of BT (British Telecom), HP/Compaq, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, Siemens, Alcatel. The bottom: Singtel, Cisco, IBM, Nokia, LG Electronics, Ericsson, Apple.

The bottom quartile is surprising because some of these companies are top performers many green and CSR rankings. It is important to remember that this is a ranking based on performance in China, not global performance, and largely deals with how responsibly the 29 companies are managing their Chinese suppliers. Such supply chain externalities are not always fully considered in other ranking systems.

Much of the January 2011 report is a critical analysis of Apple, which these groups find the least transparent of all the ranked vendors.

The ranking table appears on page 28 of the report.