Of the total, 840 million yuan (US$101 million) came from treasury bonds allocated by the government, according to Wang Jianyu, deputy director of the machinery division of the commission's Department of Industrial Development.

The rest of the money was contributed by the companies themselves or local governments, among others, he said.

Wang said more than 100 Chinese companies across the country have benefited from such projects, designed to help Chinese companies introduce and master foreign advanced techniques to upgrade their production capacity.

It is estimated that the annual output value of China's environmental equipment industry will reach more than 4 billion yuan (US$484 million) by 2005, he added. Currently the annual output value is just over 1 billion yuan (US$120 million).

Wang was attending the first China International Exhibition on Environmental Monitoring Instrumentation, which opened yesterday in Beijing and will end tomorrow.

The exhibition is sponsored by the State Environmental Protection Administration and has been jointly organized by the China National Environmental Monitoring Center and the Beijing Maoda Environmental New Technology Co Ltd.

More than 170 companies, including 10 foreign-funded ones, are displaying their products, such as water and air-monitoring equipment.

Chen Changmin, executive director of the Guangzhou-based Scientific Engineering System Co Ltd, said: "We received 10 million yuan (US$1.2 million) in treasury bonds in 1999, which helped us introduce techniques from France for water monitoring."

Chen, attending the exhibition with his firm's products, said that, after adopting the new techniques, water-monitoring equipment has become his company's dominant type of product.

(China Daily October 30, 2002)