Did a Chinese farmer spend 16 years learning law so he could sue a chemical company?

Question

According to this meme, a chinese farmer spent 16 years preparing for and ultimately winning a lawsuit against local energy company Qigua Group.

Now I've been digging around a bit and found several references to this story. But all of them refer back to the original post on People's Daily Online. Problem is, it's in Chinese and I cannot easily vet it as a source.

Here are some of the links picking up on the story:

• Farmer spends 16 years studying law by himself so he could sue a powerful chemical firm for 'polluting his land' - and he wins the first round (refers back to original source)
• Chinese farmer studies law for 16 years to sue corporation for polluting his village (refers back to original source)
• Farmer Studies Law for 16 Years to Sue Chemical Company for Polluting His Land (refers back to original source)
• Elderly Chinese Farmer Spent 16 Years Studying Law so He Could Sue Company That Polluted His Land (refers back to original source)
• Meet the Chinese farmer who taught himself law in order to sue a corporation (refers back to original source)

To be clear, I do not really consider any of the above sources reliable in this matter.

Is there any truth to this?

Answer 1

tl;dr- This appears to be based on a true story, however the overall narrative seems pretty misleading. In particular:

• The farmer wasn't a one-man crusade.

• The farmer didn't spend 16 years preparing to sue the chemical company.

• The farmer didn't need to rely on his own legal expertise since he had a lawyer.

Short version

The factual background about a farmer working toward a legal victory over a chemical company appears to be true, as supported by the references below. Some of the dramatic details like if the farmer bartered with the local bookstore using corn are harder to verify, though they do seem plausible.

Despite most of the facts checking out, there are two at-least-misleading statements in the meme:

A Chinese farmer who quit school in 3rd grade spent 16 years teaching himself law to sue a chemical company for polluting his village.

This sounds like he spent 16 years teaching himself law before filing the lawsuit. Rather, the pollution event happened in 2001 while the case was won in 2017; that's 16 years from start-to-finish, leaving no window for him to have spent 16 years studying to sue the company.

Also, it seems weird for the meme to talk about the farmer studying law as though he were acting as his own lawyer, which doesn't appear to have been the case.

He won the case in 2017.

The claim that he won the case makes it sound like he alone fought and won the battle. Since he was hardly alone, this wording's at least misleading.

Case study from 2015

The best reference that I've found is "China chemical safety case study: Qihua PVC plant in Qiqihar, Heilongjiang Province" (PDF) (2015-01), predating the cited news article by a bit more than two years. The source of this case study is IPEN.

Google Translate gives the farmer's name as "Wang Enlin". The PDF's take on his legal battle:

Starting a legal process

Wang Enlin began work to protect his rights in 2006 and received assistance from the Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims (CLAPV) in 2007. “Contaminating 28.57 hectares of land, including farmland and grassland, at one time is actually a crime,” said Professor Wang Canfa, an environmental law expert at China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL) in an interview with the Legal Daily back in 2008.20 Associate Professor Xu Kezhu, another environmental law expert at CUPL, believes that the QCG has violated Articles 45 and 63 of China’s land administration law as well as the provisions concerning the crime of illegally occupying agricultural land in Article 342 of China’s criminal law, as it leased the land and has contaminated it by storing industrial waste there for a long period of time.

Wang Enlin and his lawyer visited the local environmental protection, agricultural and land administration bureaus (as well as law enforcement authorities) only to see inaction of the administrative authorities and the local court’s unwillingness to hear this case. However, instead of giving up, Wang Enlin collected key evidence such as copies of the land agreement and the overall plan for land use over the past years.

Apparently a documentary film crew helped to increase their visibility. Note that the film crew, Green Beagle, is listed as a co-author of this case study, so there may be bias.

Green Beagle staff members invited documentary filmmaker Wang Jiuliang to visit Qiqihar in early July 2014, where interviews took place with Wang Enlin, Wang Baoqin, Li Diankui, Yang Zhenqing and other active participants in the pollution issue. They film crews gathered information and filmed other pollution victims in the village. In addition, they collected four sediment samples (one surface water sample and two groundwater samples) for testing, further determining the main pollutants as evidence in the upcoming civil damages trial.

Report from 2008

This story (2008-10-22), translated by Google as "Why is it so hard to judge criminal responsibility for environmental", discusses the same court case. This article also mentions the farmer, Wang Enlin:

Wore the bleak autumn wind, Qiqihar City Angangxi District elm village village Wang Enlin and Wang Baoqin early in the morning arrived at the Angangxi District Court.

Since this article is from about 8.5 years ago and it sounds like Wang Enlin was heavily involved in the legal process at this point, it seems plausible that he was invested in this battle since the initial pollution event that the article alleges happened in 2001, giving plausibility to the 16-year figure.

Uncertainty over Wang Enlin's personal life

Given these sources, it appears that this claim is based on a true story.

Other details are harder to verify with certainty. For example, from the meme image:

Wang Enlin couldn't afford to buy all the law books he studied at a local bookstore, so he paid the store in bags of corn to let him sit and read, copied all of the information by hand, and learned what he could with the help of a dictionary.

As a rural Chinese farmer, it seems pretty likely that Enlin was poor and uneducated, so it's entirely plausible that he couldn't have easily afforded a library of legal textbooks. Doubly so if the local agricultural industry took a hit from the land being contaminated, as alleged by the law suit.

And since both of the above references mention the locals growing corn, it seems plausible that a local farmer would've had access to corn to barter with. So that part's also quite reasonable.

But, did he actually barter with the corn that he probably had access to for the ability to read legal texts at a local bookstore? That's harder to verify.

Also, I didn't find anything about whether or not he quit school in the 3^rd grade. This seems plausible, but not verified.

The claim that Wang Enlin won the case

The claim that "[h]e won the case in 2017" is arguably true in the sense that it seems like Wang Enlin was heavily involved in pursuing a court case that was apparently won (haven't found official verification of the court's decision).

However, the wording seems at least misleading in that Wang Enlin wasn't the only one behind this. As noted by the above references, others were involved in this law suit, including some government officials, academics, other farmers, reporters, and the documentary crew; possibly others too.

Answer 2

Wang Enlin actually lost.

According to Agence France Presse in November 2017

This February, Wang and his self-styled “Senior Citizen Environmental Protection Team” earned a rare victory when a local court ordered Qihua to clear up their chemical waste site -- adjacent to the farmers’ land -- and pay a total of 820,000 yuan ($120,000) to compensate for lost harvests in 55 affected rural households.

But that ruling was overturned on appeal, and Wang is now gearing up to fight back on another day in court.

“We will absolutely win. The law is on our side,” Wang told AFP.

Therefore in fact we can state that Wang et al in fact lost the case, in that the ruling was overturned on appeal.

The statement "Wang is now gearing up to fight back on another day in court" and "We will absolutely win. The law is on our side" is ambiguous at best. This could mean:

1. Wang et al had appealed the case to a still higher court, and since that date this case has most likely been decided in his favour or against him.
2. Wang et al in fact had lost the case at this point and there were no further appeals possible, 'the law is in our side' being more an expression of hope or wishful thinking than the reality of the situation.

The original English and Chinese sources from February 2017 do make it clear that there was an appeal that had been filed by Qihua at that time.

According to the story China was not happy about the reporting, and the next news was from 8 August 2018 when the Chinese government environmental organization CBCGDF reported that Wang had died. The report said he spent too much time working on environmental cases which caused his health to deteriorate and he died.

So:

1. Wang initially won the case "On February 3 [2017], all major official media in mainland China reported his deeds .. The court ordered the company to compensate 55 farmers for economic losses of about 820,000 yuan. However, after Qihua Group appealed, the case was remanded for retrial, and the trial was held [I assume this means 'accepted' or 'scheduled] again a few days ago."
2. Wang lost the appeal some time between February and November 2017.
3. There is no real indication that the case went any further after that.
4. Wang died in 2018, supposedly from working on too many environmental cases.