{"id":261,"date":"2006-01-21T12:37:48","date_gmt":"2006-01-21T04:37:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=261"},"modified":"2006-01-21T12:37:48","modified_gmt":"2006-01-21T04:37:48","slug":"full-mandarinization-impossible-says-prc-education-official","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2006\/full-mandarinization-impossible-says-prc-education-official\/","title":{"rendered":"Full Mandarinization impossible, says PRC education official"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>China&#8217;s huge population and lack of resources mean the country will never manage to get all its people to speak the national language Mandarin or standarded Chinese despite a 50-year campaign to do so, said a senior education official. <\/p>\n<p>But the fact that more than half of China&#8217;s 1.3 billion people can now speak Mandarin represents a tremendous success, Zhang Shiping, vice director of the education ministry&#8217;s language planning department, told Reuters. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I would say a 60 to 70 precent penetration rate is the best we&#8217;ll ever achieve,&#8221; Zhang said. &#8220;China is too big, and has too many poor areas to get to 100 percent. That will never happen.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The article, alas, continues the standard but incorrect practice of referring to &#8220;dialects&#8221; (as opposed to separate languages), though at least it did add this:  <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Linguists say some of the dialects are actually separate languages, but in China they are officially seen as dialects of a single Chinese language.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Significantly, however, that sentence was deleted from the version of the story posted on the Web site of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shanghaidaily.com\/art\/2006\/01\/21\/237286\/Mandarin_push_everlasting_task.htm\"><i>Shanghai Daily<\/i><i><\/i><\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.stuff.co.nz\/stuff\/0,2106,3545458a12,00.html\">China gives up on speaking the lingo<\/a>, Reuters, January 20, 2006<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>China&#8217;s huge population and lack of resources mean the country will never manage to get all its people to speak the national language Mandarin or standarded Chinese despite a 50-year campaign to do so, said a senior education official. But &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2006\/full-mandarinization-impossible-says-prc-education-official\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,51,28,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-chinese","category-dialect","category-languages","category-mandarin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}