Writing systems that use Chinese characters also include various punctuation marks, derived from both Chinese and Western sources. Historically, jùdòu annotations were often used to indicate the boundaries of sentences and clauses in text. The use of punctuation in written Chinese only became mandatory during the 20th century, due to Western influence. Unlike modern punctuation, judou marks were added by scholars for pedagogical purposes and were not viewed as integral to the text. Texts were therefore generally transmitted without judou. In most cases, this practice did not interfere with the interpretation of a text, although it occasionally resulted in ambiguity. The first book to be printed with modern punctuation was Outline of the History of Chinese Philosophy (中國哲學史大綱) by Hu Shih, published in 1919. Traditional poetry and calligraphy maintains the punctuation-free style. However, most editions of classical texts published since the 1930s are punctuated with fully modern punctuation (or at least using the modern equivalents of the traditional judou marks). The usage of punctuation in China is regulated by the Chinese national standard GB/T 15834–2011 "General rules for punctuation".

Shape of punctuation marks

Many ancient Chinese books contain thousands of words with no spaces between them; however, when necessary to explicitly denote a pause or break, judou marks such as "" and "" were used. Similar to the development of punctuation in Europe, there were varying types of judou marks. For instance, a Song dynasty print of Chronicles of Huayang used full-width spaces to denote a stop, whereas a print of Jingdian Shiwen from the same period simply used "." and "、" marks. Qu Yuan's Li Sao used the character and grammatical particles to denote stops, similar to judou marks. In Written Chinese, each character conforms to a roughly square frame, so the entire text can fit into a grid. Because of this, East Asian punctuation marks are larger than their European counterparts, as they should occupy a square area that is the same size as the characters around them. These punctuation marks are called fullwidth to contrast them from halfwidth European punctuation marks. Chinese characters can be written horizontally or vertically. Some punctuation marks adapt to this change in direction: the parentheses, square brackets, square quotation marks, book title marks, ellipsis marks, and dashes all rotate 90° clockwise when used in vertical text. The three underline-like punctuation marks in Chinese (proper noun mark, wavy book title mark, and emphasis mark) rotate and shift to the left side of the text in vertical script (shifting to the right side of the text is also possible, but this is outmoded and can clash with the placement of other punctuation marks).

Marks similar to European punctuation

Marks imported from Europe are fullwidth instead of halfwidth like their original European counterparts, thus incorporating more space, and no longer need to be followed by an additional space in typesetting:

Other punctuation

Other punctuation symbols are more different, in shape or usage:

Punctuation marks

Typographic styles

The following are commonly suggested typographical styles; however, they are rarely carried out in practice and often only used when necessary. Proper name marks and title marks are primarily used in textbooks and official documents in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.

Apostrophe

There is no equivalent of the apostrophe in Chinese. Therefore, it is omitted in translated foreign names such as "O'Neill". Likewise, the hyphen is used only when writing translated foreign names with hyphens. Otherwise, it is not used in Chinese and is omitted when translating compound words.

Use of punctuation marks

Several punctuation marks have ranges of use that differ from the way they are used in English, though some functions may overlap.