xetex installation broken?

Question

I have xetex installed on a Mac with the texlive 2011 installation.

here is my source file:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\begin{document}
Web 安全与电子商务 
\end{document}

here is my error:

$ xetex xetex
This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-0.9997.5 (TeX Live 2011)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./xetex.tex
! Undefined control sequence.
l.1 \documentclass
                  [11pt]{article}
? ^D
! Emergency stop.
l.1 \documentclass
                  [11pt]{article}
No pages of output.
Transcript written on xetex.log.

here is my logfile:

$ cat xetex.log 
This is XeTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.3-0.9997.5 (TeX Live 2011) (format=xetex 2011.7.3)  4 OCT 2011 11:04
entering extended mode
 restricted \write18 enabled.
 %&-line parsing enabled.
**xetex
(./xetex.tex
! Undefined control sequence.
l.1 \documentclass
                  [11pt]{article}
? 
! Emergency stop.
l.1 \documentclass
                  [11pt]{article}
End of file on the terminal!

No pages of output.
$ 

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You should call

xelatex filename

and not xetex filename, as the latter will process the file with the LaTeX format over the XeTeX engine.

However the minimal example would not give any sensible result, because the default font doesn't know Chinese characters and fontspec should be loaded:

\documentclass[11pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{My Chinese Font}
\begin{document}
Web 安全与电子商务 
\end{document}

where My Chinese Font should be substituted by the name of a font containing Chinese characters.