Since the early 2000s, Sustainable Supply Chain Management (SSCM) has drawn much attention from both industry and academia alike. Organizations review their products and processes in order to deliver more environmental friendly products and services. A high number of papers have been published to follow the trend (Seuring, 2013). Of the SSCM research, existing literature is focused on building the definitions of SSCM – defining SSCM and building the related roadmaps and frameworks (Carter and Rogers, 2008; Seuring and Muller, 2008); some start looking at the implementation of SSCM (Lam, 2011; Walker and Jones, 2012); while others discuss the strategies of SSCM (Seuring and Muller, 2008; Harms et al., 2013). Most authors focus their discussion on the enablers and barriers for organizations implementing SSCM (Seuring and Muller, 2008; Walker et al., 2008; Gimenez and Tachizawa, 2012; Walker and Jones, 2012; Harms et al., 2013). Some focus the debate on SSCM governance mechanisms (Mamic, 2005; Gimenez and Tachizawa, 2012); others consider the decisions to pursue sustainability in a complex and uncertain environment (Pagell and Wu, 2009; Wu and Pagell, 2011). In recent years, the research interest in SSCM has shifted from focusing on focal companies to Tier 1 suppliers (Wilhelm et al., 2016a, b) and multi-tier supply chains (Mena et al., 2013; Grimm et al., 2014; Tachizawa and Wong, 2014). However, among these studies, very few contributions (e.g. Defee et al., 2009a, b; 2010; Gosling et al., 2016) focus on the role of supply chain leadership in the implementation of sustainable initiatives in a multi-tier SSCM context, although organization leadership is believed to be vital to win competitive advantage. Biotto et al. (2012) provide a single case study of Illycaffe Group, focusing on quality oriented supply chain learning where Illycaffe played a supply chain coordinator role (and a leader role) in order to efficiently and effectively manage quality along the whole supply chain. They conclude that the coordination of supply chain learning needs substantial effort and resource commitment from the leader organization (ibid). We study the MNCs’ SSCM practices in China because China is the ‘factory of the world’ (Harney, 2008) and is still one of the most rapidly developing centres of production in the world (Biggermann and Fam, 2011). On the other hand, China has also been the ‘largest carbon emission country’ and ‘largest energy consumer country’ (Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2012). Since academic and anecdotal evidence show that MNCs are leaders of their supply chains in China, many Chinese suppliers and customers are attempting to learn sustainability initiatives of MNCs.