China has specified in GB 18030 a new encoding of UCS for use in Chinese government systems that is backwards-compatible with the widely used GB 2312 and GBK encodings for Chinese. It seems though that the first version (released 2000-03) is somewhat buggy and will likely go through a couple more revisions, so use with care. GB 18030 is probably more of a temporary migration path to UCS and will probably not survive for long against UTF-8 or UTF-16, even in Chinese government systems.