.中国 is now a web domain name!

Hurrah! Over the weekend, the new .中国 and .中國 (dot.zhongguo or .China) domain names were approved by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)! Said the President of the group:

“This approval is a significant change for Chinese language users worldwide,” said Rod Beckstrom, President and Chief Executive Officer of ICANN. “One fifth of the world speaks Chinese and that means we just increased the potential online accessibility for roughly a billion people.”

As planned previously, the campaign will transition existing websites smoothly by automatically assigning the new domain to websites that currently end with ".cn" in China.

It won't just be China! Hong Kong will get .香港 (.hongkong) and Taiwan will get both .台灣 and .台湾 (.taiwan). All fine and dandy, but how do people type those things out anyhow?

I know in Taiwan at least, they have the bopomofo system, but China superceded that with the pinyin system a long, long time ago. When people too old to know English get on the internet in China right now, what do they use? Strokes?

Hehehe... strokes. Just in time for the other domain name ICANN is rolling out: .xxx