Author: Cao Qinming

Editor: Chen Guoqiong

Photographer: Kuang Xiaodong, Long Jiaxin

Jinan University Media Center News: The 65th meeting of the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2/IRG (International Chinese Character Encoding Working Group) was successfully held from October 13 to 16, 2025, in a hybrid online and offline format at the College of Chinese Language and Culture, Jinan University.

The meeting brought together over 50 participants, including delegates from IRG member bodies and individual experts. Attendees represented regions and organizations including the Chinese mainland, South Korea, the United Kingdom, Vietnam, the United States, Japan, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, the Macao Special Administrative Region of China, the Taipei Computer Association (TCA) from the Taiwan region of China, the Unicode Consortium, and the SAT Tripitaka Text Database Committee. The Chinese delegation comprised 19 representatives from institutions such as the China Electronics Standardization Institute, the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing Founder Electronics Co., Ltd., Microsoft (China) Co., Ltd., Weifang Beida Qingniao Huaguang Phototypesetting Co., Ltd., Gu Lian (Beijing) Digital Media Technology Co., Ltd., Jinan University's College of Chinese Language and Culture, Beijing Normal University, Sichuan International Studies University, and Liaoning University.

The meeting reviewed activity reports from member bodies and conducted the third round of examination of the "Chinese Character Encoding Working Set 2024" submitted by each member. The set submitted by China included 1,000 characters proposed for encoding, consisting of 700 Chinese characters and 300 ancient Zhuang characters. The standardization of these characters will provide fundamental support for areas like geographical name information processing and the digitization of ancient texts.

During the sessions, 61 proposals and documents were reviewed. Key discussion topics included the CJK Unified Ideographs Component Coding Scheme, the expansion of Chinese-origin glyphs, the disunification of already-encoded characters, revisions to IRG working principles, and encoding issues related to mixed-script environments.

As a member of the Chinese delegation, Jinan University's College of Chinese Language and Culture successfully completed its planned tasks and achieved several positive outcomes. First, the inclusion of over a thousand new characters addresses the "missing character" issue in Chinese language teaching materials, particularly for ancient texts and place names, thereby enhancing the accuracy of instructional content. Second, the college's active participation facilitates the translation of practical needs from teaching—such as distinguishing commonly confused characters and incorporating dialect characters—into concrete encoding proposals, promoting synergy between pedagogical and technical standards. Third, the standardized encoding of minority scripts like ancient Zhuang provides a foundation for organizing historical documents from southern China and supports the potential development of cross-border databases for ethnic cultural heritage. Finally, through engagement in international standard-setting, the college contributes to strengthening the discourse power in the global digitalization of the Chinese language.