Her Legal Crusade

In China, environmental crimes are rarely challenged. But one lawyer is setting new precedents.

Jingjing Zhang laughs when asked about her nickname: the Erin Brockovich of China. It's a comparison she's heard often since 2005, when she helped win what was perhaps the largest class-action environmental lawsuit in Chinese history. More than 1,700 villagers in Fujian Province were awarded compensation from a factory that had dumped chlorine and chromium 6-the highly toxic chemical implicated in the cancer clusters exposed by Brockovich's California case-into the water supply.

Though Zhang focused on crop damage rather than human illness (the latter is much more difficult to prove in court), and the local residents she represented won a fraction of the money the California plaintiffs were awarded, the ruling was no less a triumph in a country where environmental wrongdoings are rarely met with legal redress. Zhang credits the 2000 film Erin Brockovich with helping inspire the villagers to take action.

"That movie is very popular in China," Zhang says. "In Chinese, it has a different name. It means 'never give up.' " The phrase could be Zhang's mantra.

Ask Zhang how much time she devotes to her work each week and she tries to figure out how many hours she is awake. At 10:00 on a Monday night in early May, she's just gotten out of a meeting in downtown Beijing. In addition to serving as a senior legal consultant for NRDC's Environmental Law Project, she's the director of litigation at China's first nonprofit environmental law office, the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims. A vocal public figure, she's slated to spend the fall at Yale University as part of the school's World Fellows program, which was established in 2001 to train emerging international leaders.

Even this late at night, Zhang, who is 38, has the patient air of a practiced listener. She grew up in a factory town in China's central Sichuan Province, where nearly everyone, including her father, worked at a state-owned chemical plant. Her mother, a doctor, ran a hospital. She recalls asking her parents about the noxious fumes that sporadically choked the town. "I still remember my father's answer," she says. " ‘If there's pollution, our government will deal with it.' "

But Zhang eventually began to doubt that anyone was adequately protecting her country's natural resources or focusing on the human health implications of unchecked industrial growth. Those living in the worst environmental conditions, moreover, were least likely to seek help within China's judiciary, deterred by exorbitant filing fees, courts that tended to side with the state, and a cultural distaste for lawsuits.

After college, Zhang worked at a law firm for a couple of years before moving to Beijing to study environmental litigation at the China University of Politics and Law, where she earned China's equivalent of a J.D. It was there that her mentor, professor Wang Canfa, founded the legal assistance center in 1999, representing pollution victims too poor to file lawsuits. Zhang volunteered at the center's hotline and was soon helping turn desperate calls into unprecedented cases.

In 2004, after being contacted by residents of a Beijing suburb concerned about a high-voltage power line being built in their neighborhood, Zhang organized one of China's first public hearings on an environmental issue. Despite the hearing and two subsequent lawsuits, the government moved forward with the project. Nevertheless, Zhang says the case served as a model for public participation, spurring a Shanghai community to challenge plans for a similar power line this year.

"Zhang says, 'Our goal is not to win cases,' " Barbara Finamore, director of NRDC's China program, explains. " 'Our goal is to save the environment, and litigation is just a tool.' "

As a foreign organization, NRDC cannot undertake litigation in China, but it can train those who do. Together with Alex Wang, the director of NRDC's China Environmental Law Project, Zhang organized a lawyers' roundtable; the group traveled to seven cities across the country to share their experiences in environmental litigation.

Chinese courts have long been reluctant to acknowledge the link between pollution and disease, even as cancer has become the leading cause of death in the nation's cities, according to China's official news agency. Zhang hopes to change that by working with NRDC to train other lawyers to pursue health claims.

As a child, Zhang would walk several hours outside her hometown in Sichuan Province to swim in a stretch of clear water. "I'm sure that river is no longer clean," she says, looking out into the fluorescent glow of Beijing in the evening.

On May 12, the Sichuan earthquake devastated the countryside of Zhang's youth. But even before then the landscape had been altered beyond recognition, scarred by decades of unhindered development. "I just can't go back there," she says.