He got his career start after being recruited by Chinese entrepreneur Joe Chen to write code at ChinaRen, an early version of social networking.

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So the group proposed assigning one code to each character with a common meaning in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, even though, in practice, the same ideogram is often written differently by different nationalities.

CNN: COMMUNICATION

In another case, he points to the Chinese security technology firm NSFocus, which had its products analyzed by the code-auditing firm Veracode ahead of offering them internationally.

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Computer coding systems convert most Chinese pictorial characters for printing, but some are so rare that they are never assigned a code.

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