Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 246

Improvement Quantitative Examination System 14 have to be made
available to the public, usually via state controlled media and the
Guangdong EPB Web site. Every major Chinese city also publishes
an Air Quality Index. This public disclosure is not the case for the
emission data of the individual companies.
Unlike Vietnam, China is using these monitoring systems for their
rapidly developing system of environmental auditing, with the China
National Audit Office in Beijing covering national policies and projects
and with provincial (and sometimes even municipal) audit offices more
locally. 15 Until recently, environmental auditing was limited to finan-
cial auditing, but increasingly performance auditing is in development.
These auditing offices are, rather, independent from direct policy-
making and implementing agencies and report directly to the State
Council (and its equivalents). Increasingly, they have a major influence
in improving state policy making, avoiding illegal spending of funds,
reporting governmental misbehaviour and even controlling environ-
mental implementation. 16 Mostly, environmental auditing reports are
not made public in China, and thus they have played a limited role in
informational governance until now. China's growing involvement and
active participation in INTOSAI, the international network of national
Courts of Audit, may also, in the near future, result in increasing atten-
tion to transparency and public disclosure, according to representatives
of the China National Audit Office.

14

UECIQES is an examination system to compare how well municipalities and
its leaders are doing in combating environmental pollution. In 1999,
Guangzhou ranked twenty-eighth among forty-six major cities in China and
tenth among twenty-one cities in Guangdong province (see, for a further
explanation of this system, Rock, 2002 ). This comes very close to a national
equivalent of the global Environmental Performance Index and data-driven
regulation arguments as developed by Esty and colleagues (Esty, 2001a ; Esty
and Rushing, 2006 ; cf. Chapter 6 ).

15

Auditing, and also environmental auditing, at the provincial level can be quite
large. The Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia (twenty-two million
inhabitants) has twenty-three hundred auditors (2005 data); 115 of them work
at the division for Audit of Agriculture, Natural Resources and Environmental
Protection. Environmental auditing had an impact in improving the wastewater
discharge fee system, combating bribing and improving the program of
conversing agricultural slopeland to grass and forests (interview, official at the
Audit Office of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, November 2005).

16

Interview, deputy director Audit Research Institute, China National Audit
Office, November 2005; interview, professor at the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, Beijing, November 2005.