We have developed a novel online Chinese handwriting recognition system that can recognize a Chinese character either by its handwritten script or by its handwritten Pinyin syllable. The new system is particularly useful when the user forgets how to write the desired character or when the desired character is too complex to be written conveniently. To assure the accuracy and robustness, several classifiers with different characteristics are integrated. The experimental results show that we have achieved an accuracy of 92.5% for 6763-class freely-written Chinese characters and 87.1% for 412-class unconstrained-style Pinyin syllables.