Abstract: Water environment quality has a direct influence on the basin sustainable development and integrated utilization of water resources. On-line monitoring on water quality is the basis and remote-sensing of water management. This paper represents the stat us of monitoring system in China and discusses on the main problems in the system. It is also deduced that the restricted factors unconformable with the demand of water management are the short capacity of online monitoring, low automatization of monitoring techniques, and lacks of qualitative analysis and widecoverage monitoring means. On the basis of the development tendency of novel monitoring techniques and requirements of basin management at home and abroad, the suggestions to build multilevel water monitoring system, introduce space techniques for increasingly monitoring coverage and develop both of actual monitoring and computer simulation, are presented for the future improvement of the system.