Chinese environmentalists take Kuaishou to court for selling illegal hunting equipment

BEIJING – In a first, a Chinese environmental non-governmental organisation (NGO) has taken a social media giant – short video app Kuaishou – to court over peddling illegal hunting equipment on its platform.

Friends of Nature, one of China’s oldest green groups, says the app – an alternative to Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and popular in the country’s smaller cities and rural areas – has allowed sellers to hawk thousands of such products.

Mist nets, poison and electrocution equipment are among hunting tools that are banned by the Chinese authorities, who regulate the activity.

The case, reported by the group on Oct 24, is among the latest in a wave of civil lawsuits by green activists aiming to expand the country’s environmental protection beyond traditional cases that target polluters.

It is believed to be the first lawsuit brought by an NGO against an internet company for facilitating the sale of weapons, which can also be found on other Chinese platforms, that harm wildlife.

Since 2015, environmental NGOs have been empowered to sue on behalf of the public as part of the country’s grand ambition to build an “ecological civilisation”. However, only those registered with the government and have worked on environmental protection activities for five consecutive years with no illegal records can file such cases.

Over the past decade, they have mounted novel legal challenges to curb planet-warming emissions, opt out of disposable cutlery on delivery platforms and even stop a hydropower project from threatening the home of China’s only native peafowl.

Yet, the risks are high for NGOs as they navigate a tightly controlled civic space. Charitable organisations have to submit annual reports on their work, and cannot engage in activities deemed to endanger national security and public interests or accept funding that violates society’s morals.

“Litigation can be destructive for us due to our limited resources,” said law and policy director He Yini at Friends of Nature, which is funded by donations and taps pro bono lawyers.

“But we continue to raise cases as they draw attention to common yet important environmental problems, and have the power to set a precedent for solving similar issues.”

Civil lawsuits are wielded only when all other means are exhausted, Ms He told The Straits Times on Dec 9 in a windowless room in the nation’s capital where her 10-member team meets. Behind her, a mural of birds frolicking in clear waters shares the wall with another of a polluted wasteland – reminders of what the team is fighting for and against.

The NGO decided to sue Kuaishou as past reports to the platform about the illegal listings had proven to be futile, and the case could be instructive for handling platform companies, a relatively new type of business, said Ms He.

According to the group, some accounts continued to operate after a short ban, while other merchants would set up new accounts to sell their wares.

She declined to share further details as the case was accepted by the courts on Sept 24 – the first step in a journey that can typically drag on for three years.

Despite the lengths of time that environmental public interest litigation can take, these cases have scored crucial wins.

In 2017, Friends of Nature picked up on alarming findings by a researcher that a dam built by a state-owned enterprise in Yunnan threatened to flood the largest remaining habitat in China for the globally endangered green peafowl.

After three years, the group finally convinced the court to halt the project’s construction.

By preventing environmental damage before it even occurred, a situation unheard of at the time, the case has since been hailed as one of the world’s most important biodiversity cases.

In another happy ending, Friends of Nature concluded its first climate change litigation six years after it filed a case against a state-owned company for not using wind and solar installations that it had purchased. In 2023, the court mediated an agreement for the power company to continue investing in the grid’s capacity to tap renewable energy.

Overall, environmental public interest litigation by NGOs has grown. In 2023, the courts accepted 240 lawsuits from NGOs, up from a total of just 93 cases raised within a year and a half of China permitting such lawsuits in 2015.

In recent years, however, environmental public interest litigation filed by NGOs has been dwarfed by that from China’s prosecutors, who now file the vast majority of such environmental justice cases annually – more than 90 per cent in 2023.

Ms He sees the trend as a positive development for the environment.

Since the bulk of environmental justice cases are handled by prosecutors, NGOs can tackle complex cases that require more time and research, she said.

So far, Friends of Nature has raised only four cases in 2024, down from an average of seven a year.

For the case against Kuaishou, the team spent four months tracking sellers and codewords that they used on the platform.

She said: “According to the law, the government will regulate enterprises and individuals that cause environmental pollution or ecological damage, but China is too big.

“That’s where the social organisations can supplement the government’s supervision.”

Mr Dimitri de Boer, who heads environmental law charity ClientEarth’s Beijing office, noted that NGOs “still come up with some of the most ambitious cases”, while prosecutors tend to stick to cases with strong legal bases in pollution control and biodiversity protection.

Since 2016, the office has trained about 500 of China’s prosecutors in climate and environmental litigation.

He said: “The procuratorate has a strong political footing, so it should not be so worried about bringing cases against government departments or state-owned enterprises.

“In fact, it has a large degree of independence from the government because it investigates corruption. In some ways, it is more powerful in China than prosecutors are in the United States.”

Unlike prosecutors who are funded by the state, cash-strapped NGOs raise fewer cases as they face greater barriers, according to research released in June by the Supreme People’s Court, the country’s top judiciary.

Mr You Lin, who began bringing cases after the non-profit he founded, Shiyan Canglang Greenway Environmental Protection Service Centre, qualified to do so in 2022, said: “To be honest, sometimes it’s just a matter of losing money, so it can be very difficult to sustain. But we still file cases because there are problems that are very hard to solve through other channels.”

For example, in a case involving Danjiangkou reservoir, a key source of drinking water in Hubei province, none of the parties sued by the group were willing to take responsibility for garbage in there until a lawsuit was filed, he added.

The centre has been involved in 10 cases, of which the judiciary ruled in favour of the group in just two cases.

But five others still had beneficial conclusions: In one, the government shut down the offending enterprise.

To alleviate costs, Mr You proposed establishing a public interest litigation fund, among other things.

Others, like Lancaster University property law professor Xu Lu, believe that the costs may have to be borne entirely by NGOs, given that the risk of losing is inherent to every lawsuit.

While a Chinese court can award costs to environmental lawyers, it seldom does, he said.

“This option is still discretionary, and you can’t expect judges to change their mentality, because for most cases they don’t assign such fees,” said Dr Xu, who has researched environmental public interest litigation.

“In some cases, there is a notable disparity between the amounts claimed by NGOs for lawyers in the name of defending public interest and the sums regarded as ‘reasonable costs’ by the judiciary.”

For another NGO, China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, the fundamental difficulty in filing these lawsuits lies not in costs, but in the lack of an environment that supports NGOs.

The non-profit, founded in 1985, has raised an estimated 150 cases on issues ranging from desert pollution to excessive mooncake packaging, winning roughly 30 per cent of them, according to its deputy secretary-general Ma Yong.

He said: “We can file a lawsuit, and immediately face impacts.

“It can be from the party we sued, it could be from the government department where the defendant is located, or it can be from other aspects beyond our imagination.”

When the group went after polluters for poisoning soil in the eastern city of Changzhou, it came under attack by internet trolls hired to discredit the organisation, said Mr Ma.

Despite the barriers, NGOs are undeterred.

At Friends of Nature’s office, a map of China is studded with colourful magnets commemorating the locations of every case that it has worked on.

Said Ms He: “Even in the cases with the worst outcomes, such as those rejected by the judges, the areas they took place in have taken some action to resolve the issues there.

“It’s still better than what the outcome would have been without these lawsuits.”