Author
Dr LI Zhao
Organisation/Institution
East China University of Political Science and Law
Country
CHINA
Panel
Environmental Law
Title
Social Activism and Administrative Responsibility: Divergent Legal Pathways in Governing the Ganges and the Yangtze
Abstract
This paper examines river governance in China and India as two contrasting yet instructive trajectories of Asian legal development in the field of environmental regulation. Rather than assuming institutional convergence, the analysis situates each system within its own historical foundations and evolving legal-political logics. In India, contemporary river governance cannot be understood without reference to the colonial hydraulic regime that reorganised river basins around canal construction, centralised irrigation bureaucracy, and extractive control of water resources. After Independence, these structures encountered a constitutional culture that increasingly relied on judicial remedies: public interest litigation (PIL), the public trust doctrine, and expansive interpretations of the right to life have allowed courts and civil society to contest pollution, allocation disputes, and the socio-ecological burdens of large dams. Ethical idioms associated with duties and justice—shaped partly by Ambedkar’s reinterpretation of dhamma and constitutional morality—continue to inform judicial engagement with rivers. In China, the River Chief System represents an administrative responsibility framework rooted in a longue durée tradition of state-centred water management. It institutionalises accountability within Party-state hierarchies and links river conditions to performance assessment. Since 2017, procuratorate-led public interest litigation has added a supervisory legal mechanism that reinforces administrative obligations without displacing the primacy of executive governance. Together, these arrangements form a coordinated, legally reinforced model of environmental administration rather than a rights-centred constitutional approach. Placed in comparative perspective, the two cases reveal divergent modes of generating legal knowledge for sustainability and environmental justice—one judicially mobilised and socially contested, the other administratively integrated and prosecutorially supervised. While the paper does not address the complex field of transboundary river governance, it argues that understanding these domestic models offers a valuable foundation for future research on regional water cooperation in Asia.
Biography
Li Zhao is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (faculty track) at the Institute for Foreign-Related Rule of Law, East China University of Political Science and Law (ECUPL), and a member of ECUPL’s Center for Legal History. he holds an LL.D. from Tsinghua University and a second bachelor’s degree in Management. Li has also studied as an exchange student at UCLA School of Law, the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. Li’s research interests focuses on comparative law, Indian law, social legal theory, with a growing interest in the environmental rule of law in the Global South. Her representative publications include “Indian Environmental Rule of Law: Transplantation and Retuning” (Tsinghua Rule of Law Review, CSSCI collected volume) and “Towards a Global South-Oriented Area and Country Studies in Law” (Guangming Daily, co-authored). She is a contributor to General Theory of Indian Law （“Judicial Governance of Environmental Problems in India”） and participates in the Ministry of Education Major Project on the Indian legal system and Sino–Indian comparative studies. She is a council member of National Institute for Foreign Legal History and a member of the Beijing Comparative Law Society. She has also conducted fieldwork in a national park procuratorate in Sichuan Province, examining prosecutorial public interest litigation as a tool for ecological protection and river governance in China.
