Surveying, Mapping and GIS

The People's Daily of China reports today that the Digital China Geospatial Information Fundamental Framework has taken shape, consisting of "four databases and one archive", containing geodetic, remote sensing, image, cartographic and special-subject databases and one surveying-mapping archive.

The article doesn't go into much more detail beyond this, other than to state that this framework is a geospatial RDBMS, containing "1:4 million, 1:1million, 1:250,000 and 1:50,000 national fundamental geographic databases and a 1:10,000 digital elevation database for the key flood-control areas of seven big rivers in the country".

As what looks like a newly emerging national GIS for China, it is impressive at least on a geographic scale. I am curious about the architecture, whether this took shape centrally or in a distributed/federated form, what infrastructure they are using (i.e. SDE, Oracle Spatial, other), for that matter proprietary or open-source, how they make it available (flat files versus ArcIMS image or feature services, or web mapping, or SOA / XML web services (OGC or otherwise)... How do they treat metadata, interoperability and standards...

I wish congratulations to the chinese government, but as a GIS technocrat who also dabbles in (and struggles with) agency enterprise architecture issues, I have many questions...