In alt.chinese.text ~{ and ~} are used instead of 'ESC $ A' (which designates Chinese to G0) and 'ESC ( B' (which designates ASCII to G0) respectively. This is called Hz encoding. In Mule you can read this newsgroup in Chinese with the combination of chinese.el, gnusutil.el, and GNUS. Load chinese.el and gnusutil.el in this order, then invoke GNUS. gnusutil.el is included in the directory contrib/lisp.tar.gz in the ftp directory of Mule. (It is not included in the distribution set of Mule.)