Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence. By Rachel E. Stern Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013. 300 pp. $99 cloth.

Abstract

Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence. By Rachel E. Stern. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013. 300 pp. $99 cloth.Why would anyone read a book on environmental litigation in China? obvious answer seems to be China's increasingly serious environmental problems, from polluted air in cities to contaminated water and soil in the countryside. But Stern's book Environmental Litigation in China: A Study in Political Ambivalence goes far beyond documenting a few major pollution cases. Using environmental litigation as an empirical case, the book provides an excellent panoramic overview of both China's legal system and its political, social, and international contexts. With an elegant organizational structure and a smooth writing style, the author paints a multilayered and colorful picture of how law works in a highly ambivalent political environment.The concept of political ambivalence offers both a theoretical lens and an empirical background for the study on environmental litigation. Political ambivalence reflects state incoherence and the reality that political signals are as likely a mishmash as a 'harmonious mesh' (p. 100), but it is different from arbitrariness and ambiguity because it is neither solely discretionary nor calculatedly vague. In China's political system, local agents, such as lower court judges, often receive ambivalent signals from above. Consequently, the judicial decisions of Chinese judges vary in two dimensions: legal formalism and individual autonomy. To what extent they strictly adhere to written law and to what extent they have autonomy beyond political influence determine the outcomes of environmental lawsuits in China. Legal innovation is most likely to occur when judges enjoy both a higher degree of individual autonomy and a balance between legalism and rough justice (p. 128). This is an analytical framework on judicial decisionmaking in one-party states that can be generalized beyond China and environmental law.Political ambivalence also affects the work of those Chinese lawyers who do public interest cases, regularly or occasionally. For these activist lawyers, environmental litigation falls into a gray area between highly sensitive cases (e.g., defending for Falun Gong practitioners) and mundane civil or criminal cases. As the author comments, The environment is a flexible cause, broad enough to encompass concerns about inequality and an overbearing government as well as pollution and nature conservation (p. 156). environmental activism of lawyers is facilitated by the financial support and capacity building effort of international nongovernmental organizations such as the American Bar Association or the Ford Foundation. …