Interview: ‘I never give up’: Q&A with Chinese environmental lawyer Jingjing Zhang

MongaBay.com reports
Jingjing Zhang has been dubbed the “Erin Brockovich of China” for her work litigating against polluting companies on behalf of affected communities within the country.
Now living in the U.S., she has switched her focus to Chinese companies operating overseas, many of them under the aegis of Beijing’s ambitious and far-reaching Belt and Road Initiative.
But jurisdictional issues mean courts in China don’t yet hold Chinese companies accountable for their actions overseas.
In an interview with Mongabay founder Rhett A. Butler, Zhang talks about her career, what strategies could lead the Chinese government to establish regulations governing overseas investment, and the influence of government policy on Chinese companies.

Western corporations have been inflicting environmental damage overseas for generations, but the sharp rise in the scale of China’s international ambitions and operations in recent years has put a spotlight on the impact of Chinese companies abroad. The emergence of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the foreign policy strategy put forth by Xi Jinping that aspires to invest trillions of dollars in infrastructure projects globally, has further ratcheted up the stakes.

Within China, the central government has been emphasizing the importance of protecting the environment, including establishing nature reserves, promoting wind and solar energy, setting goals for reducing the “energy intensity” of its economy, and talking up the idea that the environment cannot be sacrificed for the sake of economic growth. But this mentality did not materialize overnight: There have been decades of hard-fought legal battles in China on behalf of the environment and communities affected by pollution.

Jingjing Zhang is one of those crusading environmental lawyers who helped put China on its domestic trajectory. Exposed to pollution that spewed from the state-owned chemical company where her parents worked in western Sichuan province in her youth, Zhang joined the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV), China’s first nongovernmental environmental law organization, while in law school. With CLAPV she went on to win a class-action lawsuit against a chemical company for water pollution in Fujian province, a victory that led to her being dubbed “the Erin Brockovich of China,” a description she expresses “mixed feelings” about.

“In China, they changed the name so it didn’t use ‘Erin Brockovich’ but the Chinese characters meaning ‘Never never give up,’” Zhang told Mongabay. “The Chinese name of the Erin Brockovich film very much represents my approach: I never give up the fight on behalf of local communities struggling against big polluters and big corporate powers.”

Her experiences in China led to the realization that she needed to do more than provide legal aid to victims of pollution and other environmental problems.

“[I] saw any one case where one individual or family got compensation didn’t address the whole situation. It didn’t solve the social conflict, the pollution, and the injustice caused by rapid development in China,” she said. “[We] developed public interest litigation, which went beyond the individual tort case to address issues at a more systemic level, challenging the government and polluters.

“Public interest litigation became a very common way for a civil society organization in China to achieve their goals on the environment. And because it was a technical legal issue, rather than a political issue, this approach doesn’t offend or challenge Chinese government too much. It leaves us certain space to do our work.”