Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 247

China's monitoring capacity is also well illustrated in the recent
establishment of the China Biodiversity Information System, a large
information system run by various research institutes of the China
Academy of Sciences. This system is strongly digitalized, with more
than one million records, and forms the basis for protecting more than
two thousand protected areas (15 percent of land cover) and the run-
ning of the China Species Red List. 17 The international Convention on
Biodiversity has strongly triggered this monitoring system.
If we do not pay attention to the national level and the more wealthy
eastern provinces and cities and move instead to poorer regions and
local levels, a much less favourable picture emerges of environmental
monitoring and information in China:
scarce environmental monitoring as a significant part of environmen-
tal monitoring needs to be funded by the local governments, who have
limited budgets and different priorities;
distortion in information processing; 18
secrecy and commoditisation of environmental data for large seg-
ments of society, also, for instance, for scientific institutes; 19
absence of a right-to-know code, legislation or practice, both at the
national and the local levels;
limited publication and availability of nonsecret data as a result of
poor reporting at the local level, no active policy towards publication
and dissemination, and limited Internet use and access.

Often only general and aggregate official data are available, and then
only for political decision makers, although specific local data is lack-
ing or kept secret for those directly involved in and suffering from

17

This list, consisting of six volumes and following the IUCN red list, was set up
by the Biodiversity Working Group of the China Council for International
Cooperation in Environment and Development, following three and a half
years of work (2000-2003) carried out by more than one hundred scientists
(see Wang Sung and Xie Yan, 2004 ; McBeath and Leng, 2006 ).

18

In an analysis of the reliability of economic data and statistics, Holz ( 2003 )
found that especially at the higher, aggregate levels of the policy-making and
bureaucratic systems, there is not much chance of deliberate falsification of
statistical data. But the sheer variety of data that are collected and calculated
by the lower echelons and sent to the central level give the National Bureau of
Statistics a remarkable freedom in selecting which data best suit political
purposes.

19

Even the Chinese Academy of Sciences has to buy environmental data for
research purposes (interview, division director CAS, November 2005).