Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 252

communications to the media and public in terms of ratings. 28 Since
the turn of the millennium, many environmental rating systems have
been developed by local and provincial environmental authorities, for
instance, in Shandong Province, Jiangsu Province, Hebei Province and
Anhui Province. Similarly, the 2004 Cleaner Production Promotion Act
has been instrumental in informational governance (cf. Guo Peiyuan,
2005 ; Mol and Liu, 2005 ). The law enables SEPA and local environ-
mental protection bureaus to publicise environmental data of noncom-
plying companies in newspapers or on Web sites. 29 Early in 2007, SEPA
published a 237-page list of more than six thousand industrial pol-
luters on its Web site, requiring them to install automatic monitoring
and control systems that are directly connected to local EPBs and plan
for disclosure of this collected data. SEPA also issued regulations on
environmental inspection and public disclosure of environmental per-
formance for companies accessing - or refinancing on - the stock mar-
ket. 30 And in May 2007 SEPA unveiled a new transparency rule requir-
ing all government environmental agencies and polluting companies to

28

To further stimulate public access to environmental information, the
Professional Association for China's Environment had, for its 2005 annual
conference, public access to information as the central theme. This conference
was strongly pushed and subsidized by the World Bank and SEPA, the two
main organizations behind the Green-Watch initiative. This program was later
developed by SEPA into the Environmental Performance Information
Disclosure programme.

29

Since implementation of the Cleaner Production Promotion Law in 2004,
many provinces used this law to force noncomplying companies to publish
emission data (using article 31) and EPBs have publicly criticized poorly
performing enterprises (based on article 17). For instance, the Guangdong
Environmental Protection Bureau released a list of thirty-three companies that
were required to accept cleaner production auditing and publish in the media
details of their principle pollutants (Guo Peiyuan, 2005 : 7-8). In 2004, Sichuan
Province required 431 companies to disclose environmental information
monthly. SEPA has detailed the relevant information disclosure articles of this
law, including the kind of information that need to be disclosed and how it was
to be disclosed, in the Bulletin on Information Disclosure of Corporate
Environmental Performance, on 5 November 2003.

30

Regulations of Environmental Inspection on Companies Accessing or
Refinancing on Stock Market ,on16June 2003. By this regulation, heavy
polluting companies (e.g., metallurgy, chemistry, oil, coal, construction, paper
and pulp, textile, leather, etc.) that want to access the stock market and listed
companies that want to refinance on the stock market for investment should
report emission levels to the EPBs. These EPBs should carry out site inspections
to verify environmental compliance, disclose this verification report in the mass
media, and report to SEPA and the China Securities Regulatory Commission.