Simplified Chinese characters ( ) are one of two standard sets of Chinese characters of the contemporary Chinese written language. They are based mostly on popular cursive (caoshu) forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the "traditional" forms that were standardly used in printed text for over a thousand years. The government of the People's Republic of China has promoted them for use in printing in an attempt to increase literacy. They are officially used in Mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia.

The pre-reform set of characters, known as traditional Chinese, are used officially in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Overseas Chinese communities traditionally use the traditional characters, but simplified characters are gradually gaining popularity as more mainland Chinese emigrate and travel abroad. At the same time, the prestige of traditional characters is increasing in the People's Republic of China.

Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizeable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some characters were simplified by applying regular rules; for example, by replacing all occurrences of a certain component with a simpler variant. Some characters were simplified irregularly, however, and some simplified characters are very dissimilar to and unpredictable from traditional characters. Finally, many characters were left untouched by simplification, and are thus identical between the traditional and simplified Chinese orthographies.