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BEIJING — Thirty-six-year-old Chinese public-service lawyer Zhang Jingjing has a lot in common with Erin Brockovich, the brash young legal assistant who took on the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in California in the 1990s and later earned fame when Julia Roberts played her in the 2000 feature film.

Like the movie version of Brockovich, Zhang has combed through industrial waste and sheaves of legal documents looking for evidence to convict corporate polluters. Both helped their clients win large settlements in class-action lawsuits.

In January, Zhang and a small team of lawyers won one of the biggest settlements in Chinese history when a court in China's southwestern Fujian province ordered the Rongping Lianying Chemical Factory to compensate more than 1,600 villagers some $75,000. Like PG&E, the Rongping Lianying Chemical Factory had dumped chromium into local water, according to Chinese media reports.

In 2004, Zhang was granted China's first-ever public hearing for an environmental lawsuit during a case against a Beijing state-owned power company that had built high-tension power lines through a city suburb.

"Chinese need to stand up for their individual interests but often they don't understand their rights or have the knowledge to fight back, so I'm trying to help them," she said. "I want people to realize that they have individual rights and can use the law to protect themselves."

Chinese citizens are traditionally subservient to the state. Zhang works to promote the rule of law as a way of saving China's embattled environment.

But the Chinese Communist Party has a long history of working from the top down to shape and control nature. Mao Zedong went so far as to order a national campaign to kill sparrows in 1958 because the birds were eating grain. Only after officials realized that insects the birds had eaten began to do more damage to the crops than the birds had done was the campaign quietly called off.

When economic reforms began in the 1980s, the party emphasized economic growth and in many parts of the country companies were given virtually free rein to pollute, as long as they made money and paid taxes.

Most of the rivers in northern and eastern China are now so heavily polluted that even with expensive treatment they cannot be made safe for drinking and acid rain falls over large areas. A recent report by the Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning stated that in each of China's 11 largest cities, some 400,000 people suffer from chronic bronchitis because of high levels of soot and other suspended particles.

Zhang's message is that the best way to protect the environment is to empower average citizens to protect their interests.

In Fujian province, several villagers who won payments from the Rongping Lianying Chemical Factory have gone on to start their own environmental watchdog groups.

"Their initiative was impressive," she said. "If that happened across China there would be a major impact."

For Zhang, the belief that saving the environment is worthwhile and that average citizens should be empowered to do so, grew out of her own experiences.

Born in a factory town in China's central Sichuan province in 1969, she grew up thinking that rivers near factories "were supposed to be red."

"Pollution was normal for us," she said. "I thought everyplace was the same."

Only later, after she moved to China's central Yangtze port city of Wuhan and then traveled around the country did she realize that pollution was a controllable problem. In 1997 she enrolled in a master's degree program at China University of Politics and Law in Beijing and began to volunteer at the Center for Legal Assistance for Pollution Victims, China's first pro-bono environmental-aid office.

After the center set up a hot line for pollution complaints, hundreds of calls flooded in from across China and Zhang realized that "many of the pollution problems are caused by lax government enforcement of laws," she said. "Citizens didn't know how to advocate for their interests."

After spending six months studying public-interest law at Columbia University in New York last fall, she began writing a simple pamphlet explaining environmental law in layman's terms. Later this year she plans to distribute the booklet.

"When people are able to protect themselves, we'll be able to protect our country," she said.