Simplified Chinese Characters (simplified Chinese: 简体字; traditional Chinese: 簡體字; pinyin: Jiǎntizì) are standardized Chinese characters prescribed in the Xiàndài Hànyǔ Chángyòng Zìbiǎo for use in Mainland China. It is one of many standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the People's Republic of China in Mainland China has promoted them for use in printing in an attempt to increase literacy. They are officially used in the People's Republic of China and Singapore.

Traditional Chinese is currently used in the Republic of China/Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Overseas Chinese communities generally use traditional characters, but simplified characters are often used among mainland Chinese immigrants. Simplified character forms were created by decreasing the number of strokes and simplifying the forms of a sizable proportion of traditional Chinese characters. Some simplifications are based on popular cursive forms embodying graphic or phonetic simplifications of the traditional forms. 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.

In August 2009, the PRC began collecting public comments for a modified list of simplified characters.