Media & Internet

Ma Jun

Founder, Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs | China

For helping big businesses — both American and Chinese — clean up their act.

A leading Chinese environmental activist, Ma Jun has leveraged the power of the Internet to pressure foreign multinationals like Apple to address their environmental impact in China — a backdoor to pressuring China’s opaque state-owned companies to do the same. After he founded the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs in 2006, Ma began compiling online databases of public records that now contain more than 90,000 corporate pollution violations, turning the heat up on companies, domestic and foreign, to clean up their act.