China’s Overseas Investment and Environmental Accountability
China’s Overseas Investment and Environmental Accountability
Wednesday, February 17, 2021
9:00 AM US Eastern Time
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About the event:
Since China began encouraging its companies to go multinational nearly 20 years ago, and especially since it launched its Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 to invest in infrastructure projects around the world, activists in host countries have accused Chinese companies of causing serious environmental pollution. China pledged that the Belt and Road Initiative would be “green and clean,” but has not taken any measures to police the polluting activities of its companies abroad. Zhang Jingjing, a Chinese environmental lawyer, talks about her work with community organizations and lawyers in African and Latin American countries to help them develop strategies for holding Chinese companies accountable.
About the speaker:
Zhang Jingjing is a Chinese environmental lawyer, the founder and executive director of the Center for Transnational Environmental Accountability, and a lecturer in law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. As the first litigation director at the Beijing-based Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims between 1999 and 2008, Zhang won several milestone environmental litigation cases in Chinese courts. She later worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council China Program and was deputy China country director of PILnet, an NGO that promotes public interest lawyering. She was selected as an Open Society Fellow in 2015, Yale World Fellow in 2008, and won the SEE-TNC Eco-award and the Women of Courage Award given by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2011. Since 2015, Zhang has focused on monitoring China’s global environmental footprint and trying various legal strategies to ensure Chinese overseas companies’ compliance with environmental laws and international human rights standards. Zhang holds a Master of Public Administration from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, an LL.M from China University of Political Science and Law, and an LL.B from Wuhan University.