(Photo : "Chinese is Hard")

In an announcement that surprised many Chinese, China's Ministry of Education announced that more than 400 million Chinese people around the country are unable to speak Mandarin, the national language of China.

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And while more than 70 per cent of China's total population can speak Mandarin, a large number of them speak it poorly, state-owned Xinhua News Agency said, quoting ministry officials.

With this surprising figure, the Chinese government has launched another move to promote linguistic unity this year. The ruling Communist Party has been promoting Mandarin as national language to promote unity in a country that has thousands of mutually unintelligible dialects and minority languages.

Only 70% of Population Can Speak Mandarin

Xu Mei, spokeswoman of the Ministry of Education told Xinhua News Agency that only 70 per cent of the country's total population can speak Mandarin, and many of them speak it poorly. The remaining 30 per cent, or around 400 million Chinese, could not speak Mandarin at all.

Xinhua quoted Xu as saying that the country needs to promote Mandarin by investing heavily in education, especially in poor rural areas, were Mandarin is almost not spoken and several other dialects that cannot be understood on a national level are being used.

The Chinese government has been launching an annual campaign to promote the language since 1998 but the effort has been hampered by the huge Chinese population and the lack of investment in education.

Campaing to Promote Mandarin

The whole third week of September every year is set aside for the holding of a campaign to promote the national language.

This year, Xu said, the Ministry of Education will focus on remote countryside and various areas that are inhabited by ethnic minorities who speak different dialects.

China has been pushing for the use of Mandarin as national dialect although officials admitted it will take time to get the whole country to be able to speak the Putonghua or the "common tongue".