Subject Re: [IBO] howto: do unicode with IBO and FB 1.5.1
Author Michael Fung
I really do want to ask the same question!

BTW, Unicode is especially attractive to programmers working on
chinese software project. Due to historical/political resaons,
chinese chars have two major incompatible encoding schemes, Big5(in
ROC) and GB2312(in PRC). This issue becomes a pain when the Mainland
China economy booms. Every Big5 users found their chinese document
cannot be read by a chinese Windows machine in China!

If you value the chinese market, unicode support is worth looking
into.