Signed Chinese

A manually coded signing system that imposes the grammar and word order of written/spoken Mandarin Chinese onto signs, analogous to Signed Exact English in anglophone contexts. Signed Chinese is commonly used in official Chinese television news interpretation and in deaf education, but surveys of deaf audiences in China have reported that most signers find it confusing because it does not follow natural Chinese Sign Language grammar. It is contested within deaf communities: some advocate for standardization around natural CSL, while others accept Signed Chinese as part of a broader signing repertoire. The debate parallels long-standing critiques of manually coded systems for suppressing the natural grammar of signed languages.