life - Speaking Chinese, a challenge for China

Howard French writes in the New York Times on one of the features in China that amazes much of the outside world: only half of the Chinese speak the official standard Chinese or mandarin.

The official view here is that all of the tongues spoken by Han are variants of one language, Chinese. But in a country with a traumatic history of civil war and fragmentation, many specialists say this theory may have more to do with politics than with linguistic reality. Many of the Han dialects are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible, more distinct than languages from disparate regions of Europe.

Not only much of the politics in China is local politics, the same goes for the languages spoken:

"We have an expression, that if you drive five miles in Fujian the culture changes, and if you drive 10 miles, the language does," said Zhang Zhenxing, a linguist from Fujian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. "In recent years, because of economic growth things have been getting better, but there are still an extraordinary number of dialects in Fujian."