MCLC: 400 million Chinese can't speak Mandarin

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Judy Amory (jmamory at post.harvard.edu)
Subject: 400 million Chinese can't speak Mandarin
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An interesting snippet, but I'd really like to know more: where are the
concentrations of people who cannot speak Mandarin?

Judy

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Source: NYT (9/5/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/world/asia/china-400-million-cannot-speak
-mandarin.html

WORLD BRIEFING | ASIA
China: 400 Million Cannot Speak Mandarin
By REUTERS

More than 400 million Chinese are unable to speak the national language,
Mandarin, and large numbers in the rest of the country speak it badly,
state news media said Thursday as the government began another push for
linguistic unity. China’s governing Communist Party has promoted Mandarin
for decades to unite a nation with thousands of dialects and numerous
minority languages, but that campaign has been hampered by resistance that
has sometimes led to violent unrest as well as by the country’s size and
lack of investment in education, especially in poor rural areas. A
Ministry of Education spokeswoman, Xu Mei, said that only 70 percent of
the nation could speak Mandarin. Yet many who do speak it do so poorly,
and the remaining 30 percent, or 400 million people, cannot not speak it
at all, the Xinhua news agency reported.