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The current plates are of the 1992 standard, which consist of the one-character provincial abbreviation, a letter of the alphabet, and five number or letters of the alphabet (e.g. Jing A-12345, for a vehicle in Beijing). The number order is produced at random, i.e. Jing A-12345 will not be issued before Jing A-12344. A computer handles the randomisation. (A previous licence plate system, with a green background and the full name of the province in Chinese characters, actually had a sequential numbering order, and the numbering system was eventually beset with corruption.)
Yellow plates are issue for large vehicles of Chinese nationality, such as trucks and buses. These licence plates usually has the Designate Area and Letter on top of the numbers, as opposed to being beside it. (In addition, they may have the licence number sprayed in large letters on the outside of the truck, or in more prominent places.) Blue plates, the most common sort, are issued for vehicles of Chinese nationality which are small or compact in size. Black plates are issued for vehicles belonging to foreigners, and persons from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. (Black licence plates are handed to vehicles of any size, as long as they are of foreign nationality.)
Military and armed police plates also exist, but -- of course -- they are inaccessible to common citizens. Traffic police have their own plates (white in background, red and black in lettering), or use a special blue plate, substituting the letter after the one-character provincial abbreviation to "O", e.g. Jing O-12345.
Motorcycle licence plates are nearly the same as that for ordinary vehicles, but are less in length and look more like an elongated square than a banner-like rectangle. There are two lines of text (province code and letter on the top, numbers on the bottom).
For qinqi or low-powered motorbikes, yellow licence plates are issued throughout.
Embassy and consulate vehicles have their own licence plate with a red character and six more white numbers. Embassies use the character shi (for shi guan) and are used only in Beijing. Consulates use the character ling for (ling guan) and are used for representations outside of Beijing.
Vehicles for use in automobile tests, vehicles for use in driving schools (examination and test-driving), and vehicles at airports all have their own separate licence plates.
For automobile tests, licence plates consist of black characters on a yellow background with the suffix shi (short in Chinese for ce shi or test). For driving schools, different plates apply for test-drive vehicles (jiaolian che) and examination vehicles (kaoshi che).
Airports have licence plates with white characters on a green background with the designation min hang or Civilian Air Trasnportation.
Licence plates with a black background and special characters are used for vehicles in cross-border traffic in Hong Kong and Macao, for trips to and from Mainland China. These plates often belong along with another (local HK/Macao) licence plate on the same car.
Interim licence plates are a piece of paper to be affixed to the front of the vehicle's window. They appear to have been withdrawn as of recently.
For a short while in the summer of 2002, a new 2002 Licence Plate Standard was instituted in several cities, including Beijing. They enabled number/alphabetical customisation. (The possible combinations were NNN-NNN, NNN-LLL and LLL-NNN, where N would be a number and L a letter. However, although the usage of "CHN", to designate China, was not permitted in the licence plates, that restriction, oddly enough, did not apply to the letters "PRC".) The VIN was also added to the new licence plates, and the plates were blue, with a gradual blue tint at the bottom end of the plates. Black letters were used on the plate.
In late August 2002 new 2002 standard plates had their issuance temporarily interrupted, officially for technical reasons, but actually because some lewd, provocative and controversial number/alphabetical combinations were used. One of the biggest controversies was when a vehicle with licence plate number USA-911 was spotted in Beijing, causing an uproar. Equal uproars were created with such plates as PRC-001, and copyright violations were rife; the plate number IBM-001 was seen. The WTO acronym was also spotted in the licence plates. in In a society that is still rather conservative in this topic, the licence plate SEX-001 was the source of yet another controversy. The number 250, an insult in spoken Chinese, was also spotted in some plates.
Possibly due to the controversies as described above, as of summer 2003, the new plates are no longer being issued. Old licence plates of the 2002 standard are not being recalled.