Zhang, Jingjing is a prominent Chinese environmental lawyer. Through her work as the first litigation director with the Beijing-based Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims between 1999 and 2008, she won several milestone environmental litigation cases in the Chinese courts and was called by the media “China’s Erin Brockovich.” She also worked for the Natural Resource Defense Council’s China Program and PILnet: the Global Network for Public Interest Law, a New York-based public interest law organization to promote public interest litigation in China, from 2009-2013. She was selected as a Yale World Fellow in 2008 and won the SEE-TNC Eco-award, and the Women of Courage Award given by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2011. Her work has been featured prominently in The New York Times and Newsweek, and she was featured in documentaries: The New York Times, China Rises (2005); CNN, PBSPlanet in Peril (2007); and PBS Frontline, The Young and Restless in China (2008).

She served as an Open Society Fellow from 2016-2018. In this capacity she worked on monitoring China’s global environmental footprint, investigating Chinese companies’ environmental performances in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asian, and testing various legal avenues to ensure Chinese overseas companies’ compliance with environmental laws and international human rights standards.

She earned her MPA from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, and her law degrees from Wuhan University and China University of Political Science and Law. She was a visiting scholar at the Yale China Law Center in 2009 and at the Harvard Law School’s East Asia Legal Studies Program from 2013 to 2014. In 2009 she delivered the Fedder Lecture at Maryland Carey Law.