About a decade before Hong Kong was to return to Chinese sovereignty, many Hongkongers and local expatriates rushed to learn Mandarin. I remember it was around the same time when it became ...

When Hong Kong was handed back from the UK to China in 1997, only a quarter of the population spoke any Mandarin. Now, two decades later, that figure has nearly doubled. But even as people get better ...

More and more Chinese nowadays are able to communicate with Chinese Mandarin, says a survey that indicates that 53 per cent of the population can communicate with the language known as putonghua.

The South China Morning Post reports that, amid an ongoing drive to promote the use of standardized Mandarin Chinese (普通话 putonghua, literally “common speech”) in a country where over 290 languages ...

An expert from the State Language Commission collects samples of the dialect in Luanping county, Hebei province. About 1 billion people in China speak Putonghua, the national, standardized form of ...

Hong Kong’s Audit Commission has urged the Education Bureau to establish the effectiveness of using Putonghua to teach Chinese language before making it mandatory for all primary and secondary schools ...