A number of papers concerning the off-line r ecognition of handwritten Chinese characters have been published in the recent y ears, and almost all of them focus on the recognition of isolated characters. Ho wever, off-line recognition of handwritten Chinese characters is not satisfacto ry. One reason is that the recognition rate is low, the other is that the segmen tation of handwritten Chinese characters is a difficult problem because recognit ion of characters relies on correct segmentation of characters. In this paper, a ccording to structural features of Chinese characters, elements are merged based on their topological relations, viz., upper-bottom, left-right and inside-ou tside. The width of elements and the spacing between neighboring elements in the whole handwritten Chinese character string are analyzed to guide the merging of left-right elements. Experimental results show that the method has satisfactor y performance for segmenting handwritten Chinese character string.