Guobiao (
abbrev., GB) (国标
pinyin guo2 biao1), is the abbreviation of
Guojia Biaozhun Ma (国家标准码), meaning the "National Standard Encoding" in
Mandarin Chinese, are publications issued by the Standardization Administration of
China (SAC) as industrial standards in the
People's Republic of China. SAC is a member of
ISO and
IEC. Its
Taiwanese and
Hong Kong counterpart is
Big5.
Like ANSI, GB standards fall in many areas. 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.
See also: Chinese input methods for computer