Problems in indexing Chinese text.

You mean beside the fact that it is a character based language instead of alphabetical? Most Chinese dictionaries use the method of listing words by the number of brush-strokes in the character. Since characters usually consist of base with one ormore radicals that modify the meaning, sometimes the base plus radicals are used as a basis for organization or indexing.

Of course, you could try using a transliteration of the Chinese Characters, but then you would have to be careful what dialect you are using because Cantonese and Mandarin use the same characters for writing, but they pronounce the characters very differently!