Over at Yale 360, Christina Larson has written an article entitled China’s New Environmental Advocates that highlights the Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims and some of the core issues that exist in enforcing China’s environmental laws.

The challenge of coordinating environmental enforcement across multiple levels of government — with central authorities often looking at the long-term picture, while regional officials remain more concerned about quick economic gains and local protectionism — is not unique to China.

Founded in 1998, and based in Beijing, Xu and a colleague brought together Centre for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims as a means to correct what they felt they needed to put their academic knowledge of China’s environmental laws to use

to date, Xu says:

The center’s staff has taken up more than 80 cases: They’ve won a third, lost a third, and a third are still pending.

One of those pending cases involves a case of where industrial pollution has contaminated the water of villagers.  It is a case where villagers felt the effects immediately:

from vomiting and migraine headaches, to diminished rice yields and dead cattle. They came to believe the factory’s sooty emissions and waste water dumped into the local water supply, the Xiang River, were the source of these problems.

The villagers first appealed to the factory owner to install more stringent pollution-control equipment. Then they brought their concerns to the local environmental authorities. But by the summer of 2004, little had changed. So the villagers turned to force to shut the factory down — twice storming the grounds to rip its power-supply unit off the wall. Each time, plant operations halted temporarily, while repairs were made, but the factory was back online within a week.

Today Xu is preparing a lawsuit against the local environmental protection bureau, which green-lighted the factory’s faulty environmental impact statement. If successful, the lawsuit will force the factory to shut down until it meets environmental standards

In the west we have a long range of jokes about the role of lawyers, and their role within our society, however through this example it is clear that going forward the role of lawyers will become more important as China’s civil society develops.