The List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters is the current standard list of 8,105 Chinese characters published by the government of the People's Republic of China and promulgated in June 2013.
The project began in 2001, originally named the "Table of Standard Chinese Characters." This table integrates the First Batch of Simplified Characters (1955), the Complete List of Simplified Characters (initially published in 1964, last revised in 1986), and the List of Commonly Used Characters in Modern Chinese (1988), while also refining and improving it based on the current usage of characters in mainland China. After 8 years of development, a draft for public comment was released on August 12, 2009. It was officially promulgated on June 5, 2013, becoming the standard for the use of Chinese characters in general societal applications, and all previously related character lists were discontinued from that date.
Of the characters included, 3,500 are in Tier 1 and designated as frequently used characters; Tier 2 includes 3,000 characters that are designated as commonly used characters but less frequently used than those in Tier 1; Tier 3 includes characters commonly used as names and terminology. The list also offers a table of correspondences between 2,546 Simplified Chinese characters and 2,574 Traditional Chinese characters, along with other selected variant forms. This table replaced all previous related standards, and provides the authoritative list of characters and glyph shapes for Simplified Chinese in China. The Table eliminates 500 characters that were in the previous version. This project was led by Professor Wan Ning from the Beijing Normal University's School of Chinese Language and Literature. Contributing to the project were Professor Wang Lijun, Associate Professor Bu Shixia, and Professor Ling Lijun, also from the School of Chinese Language and Literature. The Table underwent over 90 revisions over a span of 10 years before its release.
Non-BMP characters
In Unicode, some characters in the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters are located outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
196 non-BMP characters in the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters
"通用规范汉字表" [List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters] (PDF). Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. 18 June 2013. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
"国务院关于公布《通用规范汉字表》的通知" [State Council announcement of the List of Commonly Used Standard Chinese Characters]. Central People's Government of the People's Republic of China. 5 June 2013. Retrieved 17 June 2014.
