Chinese domain names used by — IMPORTANT Websites run by city government departments have adopted domain names using Chinese characters to make them easier for elderly people and others not fluent in pinyin to use, the city’s IT commission said…

IE7 and Safari for Windows both come standard with support for IDNs. Download Safari for Windows

Both browsers support direct input of non latin characters into the address bars.

English Article on same topic

2007年4月10日，中国互联网络信息中心（CNNIC）推出“百万中文.CN网站打造计划”，力争通过宣传普及中文域名价值，推动一百万个网站开通中文.CN域名，从而为中国网民打造出一个便捷的中文上网环境。

信息产业部、国务院新闻办公室、中央机构编制委员会办公室、CNNIC工作委员会的领导出席了会议。同方股份有限公司、新浪网、京杭大运河申遗网站等机构代表在会上分享了启用中文.CN域名的经验。

为推进“百万中文.CN网站打造计划”，中国互联网络信息中心将继续在信息产业部统一领导和部署下，一如既往地在政策、研发、技术标准和服务等方面投入资源和支持，联动 IE7.0、Netscape、Opera、Firefox等浏览器，在全国范围内举办大规模巡展，帮助企业快速注册和应用；协助推动各地新闻网站、各地政府、事业单位、企业网站开通中文.CN域名；同时，针对广大网民在全国进行大规模中文上网知识普及等，推动母语上网全方位发展。可以预见，2007年将成为中文.CN域名的启用普及年。

中文.CN在全球互联网上的应用环境已经日臻完善，“百万中文.CN网站打造计划”的推出，旨在解决当前中国互联网发展的基础性瓶颈，解决历史上“非母语上网”存在的障碍，让更多的普通大众都可以通过熟悉的母语中文上网，提高网络应用效率，从而使中国互联网能够更广泛地服务于大众。

An internationalized domain name (IDN) is an Internet domain name that (potentially) contains non-ASCII characters. Such domain names could contain letters or characters from non-Latin scripts such as Chinese (like the domain hosting this blog), Arabic, Korean etc.
IDN has, by the standards of the Internet, a long history; it was originally proposed in 1996 (by M. Duerst) and implemented in 1998 (by T.W.Tan et al). After much debate and many competing proposals, a system called Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) was adopted as the chosen standard, and is currently, as of 2005, in the process of being rolled out.
In IDNA, the term internationalized domain name means specifically any domain name consisting only of labels to which the IDNA ToASCII algorithm can be successfully applied. (For the meaning of ‘label’ and ‘ToASCII’, see the Wikipedia sections ToASCII and ToUnicode under Internationalized Domain Name.)

Singapore, 01 March 2005

i-DNS.net International Pte. Ltd., the Singapore-based company that pioneered the concept and technology behind multilingual domain names, also known as Internationalised Domain Names (IDN), in an exclusive partnership with CNNIC, the Chinese Internet Agency responsible for Domain Names and with the approval of the Ministry of Information Industry of the People’s Republic of China…read article