Despite support for dialects, Mandarin's influence reaches deep. Speaking the language well is considered a sign of good breeding and education. And because China has bound use of Mandarin so closely to the idea of national unity, promotion of other dialects can sometimes be seen as insulting if not traitorous.
Self-governing Taiwan's efforts to promote its local dialect have been angrily denounced in Beijing as "anti-Chinese." Even at an entertainment awards show in Shanghai, Chinese reporters drown out Hong Kong celebrities speaking in Cantonese with exasperated shouts of "speak Mandarin."
The annual meeting of China's legislature is a jamboree of regional accents and languages. Delegates, including Tibetans, Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong and Macao, and Turkic Uighurs from Xinjiang in the remote northwest, struggle to make themselves understood in Mandarin. Other delegates and Chinese reporters strain to understand.
The farther from Beijing, though, the tougher communication becomes.
In the bazaar in Minfeng, a town deep in the Xinjiang desert, ethnic Chinese strain to understand Turkic Uighurs' thickly accented, broken Mandarin.
"Every Uighur student who comes here has already learned Chinese in elementary school. Their levels vary wildly, but they can all understand it at certain levels," said Li Qiang, principal of Middle School No. 1 in Korla, a town in central Xinjiang.
But, he added, "we sometimes need to work very hard to understand each other."
