Legal Regulation Of Pollution Transfer In Foreign Direct Investment

As China is the world's top foreign investment recipient, foreign direct investment plays an important role in the country's national economy and its impact on the country's economic development is self-evident. Nonetheless, while bringing economic development and technological advance to our country, foreign direct investment also gives rise to such environmental issues as pollution transfer which damages our biological environment and our sustainable development.Reasons for the pollution transfer in foreign direct investment can be explained from many areas. Looking from the legal perspective, there lacks sufficient regulations on this issue in the positive law. Regulations on pollution transfer in foreign direct investment concern the international law and the national law. Despite the regulations on this matter in the international law, they lack neither restrict executive standard nor effective sanctions and thus are not feasible. We have to mainly resort to the rule and supervision of national law to solve the issue. The regulations on the problem in our current domestic law can be divided into three areas:first, to regulate on the admittance of foreign capital; second, to control through the environmental management system; third, to investigate the environmental responsibility. All the three methods have deficiencies. Combined with the problems of the ineffective law enforcement in the environmental protection and the insufficient public participation, our regulation on the matter is ineffective.Therefore, our country should, guided by the scientific outlook on development and the concept of sustainable development, put more efforts in the legislative activities, perfecting relevant systems, accelerating the environmental law enforcement, and developing the system of public participation, so as to effectively regulate on the pollution transfer in foreign direct investment.