The Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), approved officially to be a member of XBRL International recently, has become the first unit in China that joins XBRL International, which will vigorously promote XBRL's application in China. XBRL is the short description for eXtensible Business Reporting Language.

According to an SSE official, joining XBRL International, an important move toward internationalization by the SSE, will facilitate the XBRL standard's application to information disclosure of listed companies, materialize supervision and service innovation, and improve the transparency of listed companies' information.

As China's securities market expands and the financial field further opens up, domestic and foreign investors pay increasing attention to the financial and operational status of listed companies and ask for higher standard for quality of their public information disclosure. XBRL, as the financial reporting language, can unify the language between the data in companies' financial statement and the off-balance-sheet statement. It not only realizes the automatic treatment of the articulation of the data in financial statements, but also ultimately guarantees the accuracy and reliability of listed companies' data. XBRL is of great significance for improving the quality of listed companies' information disclosure.

At the end of 2002, the China Securities Regulatory Commission began to organize personnel from the SSE, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange and some software companies to draft the "Electronic Information Disclosure Specification for Listed Companies", which adopts the XBRL standard in technology framework. In accordance with the specification, the SSE actively explores and applies the XBRL standard and promotes the innovation in information disclosure of listed companies. Keeping ahead home and abroad, the SSE succeeded in applying XBRL to the disclosure of the abstracts of annual reports of 2003, the first quarter reports of 2004, the abstracts of annual and semi-annual reports of 2004 and the full texts of annual reports of 2004.