Variant Chinese Character - Regional Standards

Regional Standards

Variant Chinese characters exist within and across all regions where Chinese characters are used, whether Chinese-speaking (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore), Japanese-speaking (Japan), or Korean-speaking (North Korea, South Korea). Some of the governments of these regions have made efforts to standardize the use of variants, by establishing certain variants as standard. The choice of which variants to use has resulted in some divergence in the forms of Chinese characters used in mainland China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. This effect compounds with the sometimes drastic divergence in the standard Chinese character sets of these regions resulting from the character simplifications pursued by mainland China and by Japan.

The standard character forms of each region are described in:

• The List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese for mainland China
• The List of Forms of Frequently Used Characters for Hong Kong
• The Standard Form of National Characters for Taiwan
• The list of Jōyō kanji for Japan
• The Kangxi Dictionary (de facto) for Korea