Installing Chinese language support in Windows XP
Two major computer encodings are used for Chinese: Big5 and GB.
gb2312, also known as GB or GuoBiao (short for "Guojia Biaozhun" or "National Standard"), is used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore. It has a set of about 7,000 simplified Chinese characters.
big5 is used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It encodes about 13,000 traditional Chinese characters.
hz-gb-2312 or Hz is another encoding. It is derived from GB and so is also for simplified characters. It was originally designed for use in email systems which could not cope with double-byte characters - the characters are disguised as single-byte ones.