GBK

GBK is an extension of the GB2312 character set for simplified Chinese characters, used in the People's Republic of China.

GB abbreviates Guojia Biaozhun, which means national standard in Chinese, while K stands for Extension ("Kuozhan"). GBK not only extended the old standard GB2312 with Traditional Chinese characters, but also with Chinese characters that were simplified after the establishment of GB2312 in 1981. With the arrival of GBK, certain names with characters formerly unrepresentable, like the "róng"(镕) character in former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji's name, are now representable. 0.3% of all web pages use GBK in January 2016.

History

In 1993, the Unicode 1.1 standard was released, including 20,902 characters used in mainland China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea. Following this, China released GB13000.1-93, a national standard (guóbiāo) equivalent of Unicode 1.1.

The GBK character set was defined in 1993 as an extension of GB2312-80, while also including the characters of GB13000.1-93 through the unused codepoints available in GB2312. Hence GBK is backward compatible with GB2312.