Greening Foreign Investment: China's Legal Framework

Abstract

This chapter explores the legal and regulatory framework that polices the environmental protection aspects of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China. It describes how the legal regime governing environmental aspects of FDI has developed over time and investigates how the Chinese central government responded to the need to regulate the environmental behavior of foreign firms. The analysis indicates that China has made steady progress in its governance of FDI, with momentum gathering particularly in the latter half of the 1990s, and that there is little evidence that the quest for FDI is turning China into a pollution haven.