<p>Is there a relationship between the frequency of characters and their respective complexity? This hypothesis, which we may call the Principle of Least Complexity, was recently tested across a number of scripts across the world (Koshevoy et al. in Cognition 238:105527, 2023). However, this hypothesis has not yet been comprehensively analyzed in Chinese, a language that provides a robust test of this idea. Because Chinese also varies in complexity both within and between scripts (simplified versus traditional), it is important to determine to what degree the overall relationship varies within and between Chinese scripts. In this article, we first report an initial exploratory analysis on Cantonese frequency data which spawned our investigation of this question. Then we discuss a confirmatory analysis on an additional dataset composed of simplified characters. Finally, we followed up with another exploratory analysis comparing Mandarin and Cantonese frequencies. Across all three analyses, the association between complexity and frequency was consistently negative, even after considering script and word length. More importantly, however, the association between frequency and complexity in Chinese was also shown to be very weak. Our analysis thus calls into question the practical implications of the Principle of Least Complexity for Chinese, as frequency seems to be a weak predictor of complexity. Consequently, we caution against investing time in controlling for the joint effects of complexity and frequency in future analyses unless further justification is provided.</p>