Guobiao

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G�obiāo (国标) (GB) in the People's Republic of China is the abbreviation of

Gu�jiā Biāozhǔn (国家标准), meaning the "National Standards", or
Guójiā Biāozhǔn Mǎ (国家标准码), meaning the "National Standard Encoding" as Chinese character encoding system.

Both are issued by the Standardization Administration of China (SAC), the Chinese National Committee of the ISO and IEC.

National Standards

Like ANSI in the US, GB standards fall in many areas. Mandatory standards are prefixed "GB". Recommended standards are prefixed "GB/T" where the letter T is from Chinese tuīji�n (推荐, recommended). A standard number follows "GB" or "GB/T".

The following is a partial list of widely used National Standards of the People's Republic of China. Compared to many international standards of ISO, many standards are identical (IDT), equivalent (EQV), or non-equivalent (NEQ).

Number	Adopted standard	Title
Mandatory standards
GB 2312-1980		Code of Chinese graphic character set for information interchange--Primary set
GB 3100-1993	EQV ISO 1000:1992	SI units and recommendations for the use of their multiples and of certain other units
GB 3101-1993	EQV ISO 31-0:1992	General principles concerning quantities, units and symbols
GB 5768-1999		Road traffic signs and markings
GB 14887-2003		Road traffic signals
GB 18030-2000		Information technology--Chinese ideograms coded character set for information interchange--Extension for the basic set
Recommended standards
GB/T 148-1997	NEQ ISO 216:1975	Writing paper and certain classes printed matter--Trimmed sizes-A and B series
GB/T 2260-1999		Codes for the administrative divisions of the People's Republic of China
GB/T 2659-2000	EQV ISO 3166-1:1997	Codes for the representation of names of countries and regions
GB/T 4880-1991	EQV ISO 639:1988	Codes for the representation of names of language
GB/T 4880.2-2000	EQV ISO 639-2:1998	Codes for the representation of names of languages--Part 2: Alpha-3 code
GB/T 5795-2002	EQV ISO 2108:1992	China standard book numbering
GB/T 7408-1994	EQV ISO 8601:1988	Data elements and interchange formats --Information interchange--Representation of dates and times
GB/T 12406-1996	IDT ISO 4217:1990	Codes for the representation of currencies and funds
GB/T 15834-1995		Use of punctuation marks
GB/T 15835-1995		General rules for writing numerals in publications
GB/T 16159-1996		Basic rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography
GB/T 16831-1997	IDT ISO 6709:1983	Standard representation of latitude, longitude and altitude for geographic point locations

National Standard Encoding

In computer contexts, "GB" alone is often used to mention GB 2312-1980 issued in 1980, or GB 18030-2000 issued in 2000. These two are encoding standards for encoding Chinese characters.

This character encoding method is used to code for Simplified Chinese characters, which are used in Mainland China and Singapore. Taiwan and Hong Kong, which use Traditional Chinese characters, have Big5 as their standard.

There are about 7200 characters in the GB 2312-1980 codeset, versus approx. 16000 in the Big-5 codeset. The pinyin, romanization of these characters, is standardized as well. It can be used as one of the several Chinese input systems (e.g., by typing Z-H-O-N-G for the character 中)