It seems China isn't only supporting its own 3G mobile standard TD-SCDMA, but also a home-grown standard document format.

The standard format, dubbed Uniform Office Format (UOF), is going to go head-to-head with the OpenDocument format and the other standard format Microsoft lobbied ISO to accept, namely Office Open XML. UOF is going to be introduced into at least six ministries in China by the end of this year. Three ministries, namely the International Department of the Central Committee of CPC, the Ministry of Commerce of China, and the State Archives Administration of China have already started using the format.

UOF has been recognized by China itself and is on the move elsewhere. China has applied to have UOF recognised as an international standard. Apparently, it will be difficult to merge UOF and ODF as they employ various ways of marking things up. Two software packages, Evermore Software and Redflag 2000, are employing UOF and are currently being used in the three ministries. China Tech News cited Ren Jinhua, a guy working at the Information Center of the International Department, Central Committee of CPC, that the standard might become compulsory for Chinese public institutions.

The International Department has been field testing UOF since November 2007, after the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology deemed it would make a good guinea pig. Should UOF become compulsory in China's public administration, then it will be nigh impossible for Microsoft or OpenOffice to churn out their document standards in China.  More here. X