XBRL in the Chinese Financial Ecosystem

The eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) is one of the most popular formats of business reports. It has been adopted by many countries and regions across the world, including China. This article examines XBRL in China and answers the following questions: What is XBRL technology? How has it been implemented in the financial ecosystem of Mainland China? What are the differences between three major Chinese XBRL taxonomies? It also highlights the challenges and opportunities of carrying out XBRL-based business analysis using the growing big data. This article is part of a special issue on leveraging big data and business analytics.