Han Xin code

Han Xin code is a two dimensional matrix barcode that encodes data as black and white squares arranged in a square grid, developed by the Article Numbering Center of China and published as a national standard in 2007 before being formalized internationally as ISO/IEC 20830 in 2021. It was created to move beyond what its Chinese developers regarded as a reliance on QR code technology, which was optimized for encoding Japanese text, by building in native support for encoding Chinese characters directly rather than through workarounds. In its largest version the symbol can hold between 1,044 and 2,174 Chinese characters, and it also supports the full ISO/IEC 646 Latin character set, making it efficient for multilingual data that mixes Chinese text with Latin characters and numbers. Because of this native Chinese character capacity, Han Xin code has been positioned in China as a domestically developed alternative to QR code for applications ranging from logistics and product labeling to official identification systems, and its later international standardization extended its recognition beyond Chinese domestic use.