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A Genuine Empowerment or Continued Authority Enhancement? Dynamic Relationships of Community Organisations with the State in Chinese Environmental Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2025

Jize Jiang Open the ORCID record for Jize Jiang [Opens in a new window]
Jize Jiang*
Affiliation:
School of Law, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
*
Email: jiangjize1989@gmail.com
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Abstract

Recent years have witnessed a “juridical turn” in Chinese environmental governance, emphasising and encouraging legal mobilisation and litigation deployment by citizens to address environmental grievances in either individual or collective forms. This legalisation movement has spawned a budding, socio-legal field of Chinese environmental justice (CEJ), with an ostensible trend towards the legal empowerment of community organisations as “autonomous” litigants representing public interests. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, this study examines how plural, fluid state–society relations are manifested, animated, and permeated in the interactive processes of the CEJ. The analysis reveals four emergent modes of political–organisational connections—the state’s challengers, allies, servants, and subordinates—all of which depend on how the Chinese state interprets their motives for using the law and engaging in litigations, and anticipated effects their legal mobilisation can generate or diffuse in society. The bounded community mobilisation within the CEJ has also embodied the continuing state supremacy and the growing legal responsiveness in the Chinese approach to modernisation. Future theoretical and policy implications for the participatory effectiveness of community organisations in the CEJ are also discussed.

Keywords

Chinese environmental justicestate–society relationspolitical–organisational dynamicsenvironmental NGOslegal mobilisation

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Asian Journal of Law and Society , First View , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with Shanghai Jiao Tong University

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