Jingjing Zhang is a lawyer and environmental activist who has fought Chinese companies that pollute for decades. Her work has brought her to many countries, where she says her native China is using a hazardous development model: Pollute now, get rich and attempt to clean up later.

In May, she visited Zambia to advise villagers whose lives were devastated when a toxic waste spill from a Chinese copper mine caused one of the country’s worst ecological disasters.

“Companies have a field day when they come here,” Andrew Kombe, a Zambian lawyer who is representing villagers, told Zhang, according to Inside Climate News. “They can do whatever they want.”

Amid widespread uproar in Africa over countries struggling to repay Chinese debt, a troubling pattern has emerged in the background of the B

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