Tong XU is a Ph.D. Candidate at Utrecht University. Her doctoral research investigates the quest for robust legitimacy in China’s water resources management, with a particular focus on how China’s legal system can be enhanced to regulate the exercise of power and support legitimacy building within its environmental governance arrangements. This research is conducted under the supervision of Prof. Marleen van Rijswick, Prof. Herman Kasper Gilissen, and Dr. Liping Dai.
Tong obtained her Master’s degree from the China University of Political Science and Law (majoring in administrative law, distinguished) and her LLM degree from the University of California, Davis (specializing in environmental law and water law, with UC Davis & CUPL Scholarship). She has been admitted to the bar in China since 2015. During her studies, she worked as a research assistant at the Institution of the Law-Based Government of CUPL, where she participated in country-wide assessment research for ‘2016 Blue Book of Law-Based Government and the Assessment Report of China.’ She also served as a research assistant at Beijing Dadao Administrative Law Research Center and as Associate Editor & Coordinator of the CUPL Postgraduate Law Review. Currently, Tong is a member of the Utrecht Centre for Water, Oceans and Sustainability Law (UCWOSL) and is a peer reviewer for several international academic journals such as Regulation & Governance and International Journal of Water Resources Development.
These experiences and academic exposure across administrative law, environmental law, and water governance continually shapes Tong's research interests. Her current research interests fall into two main areas:
First, Tong seeks to understand and reflect on contemporary environmental and other social issues from a legal-sociological perspective. By adopting this perspective, she aims to contribute to a clearer and more systematic understanding of the complexities of environmental and social problems, as well as the practical and normative challenges that legal practitioners face in these contexts.
Second, Tong demonstrates a keen interest in how legal argumentation functions both within the legal community and in broader societal discourse (to gain more audience), especially in scenarios where professionals from other disciplines challenge the arguments made by legal professionals through legal reasoning, and endanger the achievement of coherent action in practice.