It is the consequence of past 2 centuries' political struggle in East Asia. Written Chinese has basically 3 different standards, in Sinosphere: 1. Mainland Ch

It is the consequence of past 2 centuries' political struggle in East Asia. Written Chinese has basically 3 different standards, in Sinosphere: 1. Mainland China: Simplified Chinese. Meanwhile, contrary to most people's understanding, PRC has standardized its own Traditional Chinese writing as well, which is permitted in logo/trademark and research purposes. 2.Hongkong: Hong Kong has its own system, and plus several hundred characters that created specifically for Cantonese. 3.Taiwan: Taiwan's system has some interesting distinction in characters like 骨(bone)，which is different from both Mainland China and Hong Kong's system. Japan ever since 20 century has simplified and revolutionized its Kanji standard on its own, but unlike China, a lot of Kanjis still follows form from the old Kanxi dictionary(康熙字典). While Korea is an interesting case, where they abandoned Hanja in everyday use, so they don't even bother to simplify it, thus Korean Hanja actually follows the most orthodoxical way of writing of all the systems mentioned above.