China is committed to the implementation of China's Agenda 21 which provides a strategy framework for China to achieve sustainable development. China's Agenda 21, a White Paper on China's population, natural resources, environment and development forms the blueprint for China's future development. China's highest priority is transforming the traditional economic development pattern from one that emphasises quantity into one that emphasises quality of development in China's transitional period in order to establish a market driven, energy and resource efficient economy.

Approaching that goal in China, we have established a special organization called "the Administrative Centre for China's Agenda 21" or ACCA21 for short. This is affiliated to the two most powerful government organizations, the State Planning Commission (SPC) and the State Science and Technology Commission (SSTC), which jointly formed a leading group for China's Agenda 21. Under the leading group, we have more than fifty ministries of Chinese government sectors, e.g. Ministry of Machinery Industry, Geology, Chemical Industry, etc. They are involved in the coordination of how to achieve sustainable development. ACCA21, which now has 25 people, does most of the day-to-day coordination not only within the government sectors, but also in research organisations and NGOs.

ACCA21 receives funds from government and carries out what is requested by government on those issues most urgent to China's population, natural resources and environment, and has employees mostly from universities -- like myself, from Peking University -- and Research Institutions like the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) to strengthen the linkage between Academic and Government agencies. And SDNP/China is now a division unit under the ACCA21 to promote information exchange among ACCA21 and government, research organisations, NGOs and enterprises for facilitation of implementaions of China's Agenda 21. So SDNP/China is not separate from our national strategy but is incorporated within the big family of China's development.

There are political and technical choices to be made in the connectivity for China's SDNP. The political choice is to connect the largest source of information, i.e. in China, the government sectors and research universities and institutions. They are the two "information sinks". The most decisive information used for policy-making is government information, but this is dispersed, and there is some duplication in the collection. Each ministry has reasonably well established information networking systems, e.g. China's Information of Economy has National, Provincial, Municipal, down to county level of Economic Information collection (with standards of their own). However, there is very poor connectivity between government sectors. Why is this? For many reasons. One is security of information. Another is that the information is perceived as being of commercial value, but the government sectors cannot sell this information, so they would rather not share it as they view that as "losing" their property.

Universities and research institutions are more willing to share information for research purposes. They are not particularly concerned with security, but they would prefer to put a commercial value on the data, and use it as a source for further research funding. So far most research was conducted with government funding, but with the new market economy, this funding is drying up, and researchers have to find new sources of funding.

So our organisation is in-between; we don't have our own self-interest in owning information -- all that we have is to share. Also, we are not directly in the government, so the other sectors are happy that we want to share information. We are not in academia, so government agencies will not have doubts about providing data to a structure which is higher in the political hierarchy, i.e. the SPC and the SSTC.

To straightaway fetch data from distributed databases is difficult because of various technical problems (like lack of uniform format of data) and policy problems (like how to share data). So the best solution is to facilitate metadata describing the sources of information, format, where the information is available and whether it is commercial or free. At present, we are designing six nodes, some of them in cooperation with CIESIN.

SDNP/China is a small group, now 4-5 people, so we enlist the help of two other agencies, one for hardware and another for software. The hardware support is provided by the Electronic Engg. department of Tsinghua university -- they will assist with the design of the LAN, Internet connectivity via CERNET and maintenance of the network. The software issues are problems like use of Chinese language on the network, homepage design, metadata framework and so on, and support is provided by Peking University.

The other five nodes are to be linked to each other and to the Internet. Use of plaintext, perhaps gopher, is practical. Dialup is probably the most cost-effective and efficient method in China today. Local calls are about 20 yuan/hour, and long distance of around 1.20 yuan/minute. (The exchange rate is about 8 yuan to 1 USD). The problem of Chinese characters is solved for the present by coding and decoding while transfer.

Homepages within China can be accessed via ChinaPac (X.25) or DDN (Digital Data Network). Chinapac charges according to the volume of data transferred and DDN charges based on the number of users.

There are four legal access points to the Internet from China today. The are a) CERNET (run by the State Education Commission) b) CASNET (for the Chinese Academy of Sciences) c) ChinaNet (Ministry of Post and Telecommunications) and d) Ministry of Electronics Industry. The first two have a 128kbps link to the Internet each, and the last two have a 256 kbps link each. The Internet connection to China has been operating as a test, without regulations, for the last five years, and the sudden popularity of the Internet has caused all the gateways to be choked. So from January 1996, all organisations that wish to get connected need to get registered with one of the four legal gateways. Until all existing users get registered, new users are not allowed. Right now, Internet access is painfully slow, especially if there are graphics -- the SDNP logo takes upto half an hour to be loaded. No one would be happy if there are more users on the Web under these conditions. At this stage, I would like to say there is no filtering or censorship on the information from the Internet -- either for political information or pornography. However, if users are found distributing such material, they might lose their access to the Internet.

So one solution we are considering is to provide a mirror site in China for information from the Internet that Chinese users can easily access; or perhaps CDROMs or diskettes that provide "offline" access to the Internet. This way we solve two problems: speed and sensitive information. This is just about the Web, not about email. Email access is fine.

What is the kind of information we urgently want?

Along with SDNP/China, we also conduct trainings on Capacity 21 project with our domestic funding trainings, we work in projects like ADB's Environmental Science Technology Transfer Centre, EU's Integrated Environment Management Unit to help in information sharing.

Thank you for your attention.