After the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the Chinese mainland in 1949, the ruling Chinese Communists implemented a reform of the Chinese writing system by simplifying the traditional Chinese characters in the 1950s. Hong Kong and Taiwan/the Republic of China (ROC) retained the traditional system to this day.

The following list (p. 2–16) shows the 3000 most frequently used Chinese characters in their traditional form (fantizi繁體字) together with their pronunciation in Hanyu Pinyin漢語拼音 (i. e. the Romanization system which was developed in the PRC in 1958 and became international standard for Romanization of modern Chinese since 1979). The characters are arranged according to their frequency, with the most frequently used characters on top.

For a better understanding please have a look at the table below which gives an example how characters were simplified. The first character in question means “picture” or “map”, the second one “broad”, the third one “to issue”, the fourth one “turtle” or “tortoise”; the character on the left shows the way it was written in all of China for more than 2000 years; the character in the middle shows the simplified version in today’s PRC; the character on the right shows the way the character is written in modern Japan—Chinese characters in Japan are called “kanji” (漢字).