NEWS//China promotes Mandarin
For 23 years, China has used the third week in September to promote the use of Mandarin.
Mandarin promotion week
Although Mandarin is China's official language, only 80% of Chinese speak Mandarin. In impoverished areas, as few as 62% speak Mandarin. (Note that 20% of China's 1.4 billion people, adds up to 280,000,000 citizens.) The inability of China's poor to communicate with the majority of their countrymen and women is a significant factor in the locking the poor in poverty.
According to the State Council of China, this program "aims to use various fun-oriented activities to promote Putonghua. Quizzes, short videos, emojis, among others, will be put on social media as part of the campaign."
Online promotion
This program to promote Mandarin is part of a broader effort. Last April, the Ministry of Education (MOE) launched an online training program to help 5,200 teachers in China's 52 poor counties to improve their Mandarin proficiency and teaching ability.
College student promotion
In addition, the Ministry of Education and has teamed with the Chinese Communist Youth League Central Committee to work on this issue. Over the summer, they dispatched 2,291 university students in 239 teams to 345 poor villages in China's central and western regions.
The State Council of China reports, "A total of 463,000 teachers, 1.96 million farmers and herdsmen, and 213,000 primary-level officials in 12 provincial regions in central and western China received Mandarin training last year."
Kindergarten promotion
XinhuaNet adds, "The MOE will channel more resources to intensify and expand online Mandarin training based on the experience accumulated through previous practices…. Xu [an official of the MOE,] said the ministry will carry out online training for leading kindergarten teachers in poverty-stricken areas to improve their Mandarin teaching ability and enable them to train local teachers.”