China has shown marked improvement in the fight against drugs in sport, but was far from perfect, World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president Dick Pound said on Tuesday.

Although satisfied that Chinese authorities had a "sense of urgency and importance" regarding doping in sport, Pound said he was not sure whether they knew how deep the problem went.

"We're not sure and I don't even think the Chinese authorities are sure how widespread the problem is," Pound said at a news conference.

"It's a large, important country that has a problem that perhaps has not been as well recognized as it ought to have been in the past."

Pound cited the recent discovery of systematic doping of athletes at a sports school in northeastern China as evidence "that there is indeed a problem and that this may not be the only circumstance."

In August, Chinese anti-doping officials unearthed hundreds of doses of EPO, testosterone and steroids at Anshan Athletics School in Liaoning Province, and found that coaches had administered banned substances to athletes as young as 15.

Pound described the revelations as "a major breakdown in the system" and a "wake-up call" for Chinese authorities - similar to the BALCO doping scandal in the United States.

"It is very embarrassing to find that one of your sporting schools has a directorship that is systematically doping athletes, many of whom are not really sure what it is they are being given," he said.

While the quality of China's equipment, research and scientists was satisfactory, Pound said China needed to do more doping tests, and compared China's 7,000 tests per year with Australia's 8,000.

"That's an imbalance that is really not commensurate with a really effective anti-doping programme. I don't think the number of tests performed bears any relationship to the size of the sporting population in China."

Pound, who toured screening laboratories and met with Beijing 2008 Olympic officials this week, said the country's "reputation" as an exporter of performance enhancing drugs was "not one that the Chinese authorities like."

But bureaucracy and other "impediments" in allowing testers access to athletes - similar to those in the former Soviet Union and Eastern bloc countries - had hampered China's anti-doping efforts.

"This is a large and complicated country, more so than ones that are perhaps more centrally organized.

"The division of responsibility in many of the areas... whether its health, science, police, customs - all of these are different departments. In order to get them together, that's a major bureaucratic effort," he said.

China, "in a structural and organizational sense", had built a sound framework to tackle doping in sport, Pound added. "They've now got to make everything work. They've got to get right down where the cheating is taking place and find a way to stop it. Partly through education and partly through rigorous testing."

(China Daily October 12, 2006)