Sustainability of Legal Transplants and Legal Borrowings in Chinese Rules on Environmental Liability: Lessons from Comparative Law

"Sustainability", "legal transplants" and "legal borrowings" are recurrent expressions in the discourse "in" and "on" the contemporary Chinese legal system. In the title of this paper the two words are conjoined not only because I will deal with one of the elective fiels in the discourses on sustainability in law, i.e. liability for environmental harm, but also because my intention is to explore certain paths of legal transplants in this field, focusing in what is the fundamental instrument that sustains circulation of legal models amongst different legal system: the language. This is a crucial aspect of the Chinese integration into the global law networks and the new set of laws for environmental protection enacted in China in the last decade in order to cope with its environmental emergency, and the environmental liability rules in particular, appear to be an interesting field of research in this respect. This paper will start exploring the Chinese environmental liability rules through the analytical lenses of comparative law and language studies. A reflection will be made in the difficulties of mantaining, expecially in a world of increasing legal contaminations, the precision of legal concepts and taxonomies which frame the rules in a given system and in the need to make a deeper analytical work on them, in order to render not only transplants and borrowings, but also processes of harmonisation and communication between laws more efficient.