A Chinese character list contains proficiency levels and corresponding character sets, which are regarded as indicators of one's reading and learning ability. The character list will tend to vary depending on the needs of learners. Over the years, officials and researchers have published different Chinese character lists for native speakers as well as Chinese L2 learners in order to meet the needs of designing textbooks, teaching or grading. As there is no official Chinese character list in Taiwan, in 2013 the National Academy for Educational Research (NAER) implemented an 8-year project with the Ministry of Education to develop corpora and a standard system, which included creating a graded Chinese character list for L2 learners in Taiwan. To evaluate the character list, this paper looks at 7 representative character lists for the purpose of comparative analysis. The study shows that the NAER's character list ranks highest in performance in terms of corpus coverage, especially at the primary level. Its average score was 4 percentage points higher than that of the European, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Chinese Hanban character lists. In terms of the character set contents, the NAER list is the most representative Taiwanese character list, and here the locality is taken into account in evaluating and grading the character selection. The final grade is based on the all of the above factors, included the details of each step in the creation of the character list. On the whole, the NAER character list is objective, reproducible, local, word-based, and meets the needs of second language learners