Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is one of the most popular dimensionality reduction techniques in existing handwritten Chinese character (HCC) recognition systems. However, when used for unconstrained handwritten Chinese character recognition, the traditional LDA algorithm is prone to two problems, namely, the class separation problem and multimodal sample distributions. To deal with these problems,we propose a new locally linear discriminant analysis (LLDA) method for handwritten Chinese character recognition.Our algorithm operates as follows. (1) Using the clustering algorithm, find clusters for the samples of each class. (2) Find the nearest neighboring clusters from the remaining classes for each cluster of one class. Then, use the corresponding cluster means to compute the between-class scatter matrix in LDA while keeping the within-class scatter matrix unchanged. (3) Finally, apply feature vector normalization to further improve the class separation problem. A series of experiments on both the HCL2000 and CASIA Chinese character handwriting databases show that our method can effectively improve recognition performance, with a reduction in error rate of 28.7% (HCL2000) and 16.7% (CASIA) compared with the traditional LDA method.Our algorithm also outperforms DLA (Discriminative Locality Alignment,one of the representative manifold learning-based dimensionality reduction algorithms proposed recently). Large-set handwritten Chinese character recognition experiments also verified the effectiveness of our proposed approach.