Nearly 60 million people in China experience problems in their daily lives because administrative departments use out of date computing standards that make it impossible to input the characters used in their names.

In 1981, the State Standardization Administration and State Language Work Committee promulgated the GB-1981 wordbank, comprising 6,763 Chinese characters.

This is considered enough for people’s daily work and lives; for example, the fifth volume of The Selected Works of Mao Zedong only uses about 4,000 characters, all of which are included in GB-1981.

In 2003, the State Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision (SBQTS) launched GB18030-2000, containing 27,484 characters, in an attempt to set an improved and universal standard in computing.

However, few administrative departments have replaced GB-1981 with GB18030-2000 and, to make matters worse, people often choose baby names using more rare characters to avoid repetition.

One source of more unusual characters that is often used is the Kangxi Dictionary, a 42-volume lexicon compiled during the reign of Qing Emperor Kangxi (1662-1722). Since this uses over 50,000 characters, even GB18030-2000 can be insufficient.

“With increased informatization, the 60 million people with unusual name characters frequently have troubles when opening bank accounts, buying insurance, seeing doctors and studying abroad,” said Li Deyi from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

“Any departments that delay installation of GB18030-2000 should be seriously punished by the SBQTS,” Li added.

To meet international standards, a newer wordbank called ISO-10646:2003 has also been developed that contains over 70,000 characters.

This includes all those in the Kangxi Dictionary, as well as the Hanyu Da Zidian and Hanyu Da Cidian dictionaries.

The National Library of China is reported to have installed this new standard in its digitalized platform.

(China.org.cn by Unisumoon, April 9, 2005)