UC Berkeley

This is a dissertation about lawyers, judges, international NGOs and legal action in an authoritarian state. The state is contemporary China. The type of legal action is civil environmental lawsuits, as when herdsmen from Inner Mongolia sue a local paper factory over poisoned groundwater and dead livestock or a Shandong villager demands compensation from a nearby factory for the noise that allegedly killed 26 foxes on his farm. Empirically, this is a close-to-the-ground account of everyday justice and the factors that shape it. Drawing on fifteen months of field research in China, along with in-depth exploration of four cases, legal documents, government reports, newspaper articles and blog archives, this dissertation unpacks how law as litigation works: how judges make decisions, why lawyers take cases and how international influence matters.

Conceptually, civil environmental lawsuits illustrate one pathway between litigation and social change in China and, by implication, possibly other illiberal states. With the exception of the first chapter, each chapter introduces a new actor's perspective on the interaction between state signals and legal professionals' response. The key theme, which cuts across chapters on the state, judges, lawyers and international NGOs, is what I call political ambivalence: conflicting official (or quasi-official) signals regarding the desirability of certain types of citizen action. Simultaneous impulses to promote law but control courts, to protect the environment and yet pursue economic growth, generate a medley of statements, cases and regulations that do not necessarily concord. For legal professionals on the ground, these mixed messages translate into a degree of opportunity. Without official sanction or intent, conflicting signals crack open enough political space to allow limited judicial innovation (chapter 3), legal activism (chapter 4), sustained international encouragement (chapter 5) and policy promotion (chapter 6). Even on tough terrain, political ambivalence over law can provide a limited opportunity to probe new roles and, in so doing, gently push the limitations of political tolerance.