Chinese character encoding

In computing, Chinese character encodings can be used to represent text written in the CJK languages — Chinese, Japanese, Korean — and (rarely) obsolete Vietnamese, all of which use Chinese characters. Several general-purpose character encodings accommodate Chinese characters, and some of them were developed specifically for Chinese.

In additional to Unicode (with the set of CJK Unified Ideographs), local encoding systems exist. The Chinese Guobiao ("national standard") system used in Mainland China and Singapore, and the (mainly) Taiwanese Big5 system used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau are two primary "legacy" local encoding systems. Guobiao is usually displayed using simplified characters and Big5 is usually displayed using traditional characters. There is however no mandated connection between the encoding system and the font used to display the characters; font and encoding are usually tied together for practical reasons.

The issue of which encoding to use can also have political implications, as GB is the official standard of the People's Republic of China and Big5 is a de facto standard of Taiwan.

In contrast to the situation with Japanese, there has been relatively little overt opposition to Unicode, which solves many of the issues involved with GB and Big5. Unicode is widely regarded as politically neutral, has good support for both simplified and traditional characters, and can be easily converted to and from the GB and Big5. Furthermore, Unicode has the advantage of not being limited only to Chinese, since it can also display many other character sets.

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