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10 interesting factoids about China (North and South)

Chinese Cantonese is spoken in the south
In the southern Chinese provinces of Guangxi and Guangdong, Cantonese is the primary dialect. Nanning is the capital of Guangxi, whereas Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong. Guang is a term that implies large or expansive.

Northern China is home to Mandarin Chinese speakers
If you travel to the northern provinces, like as Beijing, Sichuan, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Baoji, you will hear Mandarin Chinese. One of China’s oldest cities is Beijing. The capital of China was formerly known as Peking.

The number four is disliked by the Chinese
In Chinese, the number four is considered unlucky. This is due to the fact that when Chinese speakers say number 4, the term for death sounds similar. However, given that the words for 8 and fortune are similar, they favour the number 8.

In China, Christmas is not a holiday
Despite the fact that Santa Claus and Christmas decorations are everywhere in December, Christmas Day is not a vacation, therefore everyone goes to work and school as usual. During the New Year’s festivities, children get gifts in the form of red envelopes containing cash.

Chinese people from the south favour rice
While noodles are preferred in the north of China, rice is the main food in the southern regions.

Speakers of Cantonese enjoy cheese
It is well known in southern China to make cheese from buffalo, yak, and goat. The Bai people produce goat cheese in the form of balls that resemble Italian mozzarella, and in Guandong, they also produce a unique buffalo milk cheese.

Chinese people are superstitious
Chinese people practise a lot of superstitions. They associate death and bad luck with the colour white, not black, as we do in the west. They dislike green as well since it can indicate that your spouse has been unfaithful. In Chinese, the number six is considered lucky. It means prosperity and happiness.

Use the Shanghai Metro
Shanghai has the world’s longest metro system. 459 stations and 479 miles of track are present, and more are being added. The London Underground only has 272 stations, for comparison.

Kentucky Fried Chicken is Popular in China
Kentucky Fried Chicken has restaurants in China, but when they first started, they made a terrible translation mistake. The powers that be thought it could be translated word for word (sometimes this can’t be done), and it came out as “we’ll eat your fingers off,” which didn’t sit well with Kentucky’s Chinese customers.

Hong Kong was formerly a British Colony
In 1841, Hong Kong was admitted as a British colony. The result of this is that English is widely spoken in Hong Kong. Cantonese and British are the two recognised official languages of Hong Kong.

Chinese consists of a group of related varieties or dialects, some of which are not mutually intelligible, therefore it is often described as a family of languages. All varieties of Chinese are part of the Sino-Tibetan language family.

In Chinese there is a clear difference between the written language (wen) and the spoken language (yu). The relationship between the two is complicated, partly because the spoken varieties of the language evolved at different rates, while written Chinese has not changed as much.

Although there are many different Chinese dialects, standard written Chinese is understood by most Chinese speakers as it is based on the standard spoken language (Mandarin).

Written Chinese is one of the oldest writing systems in the world still in use today, originating in the late Shang Dynasty (1200-1050 BC). Its characters gradually evolved and were standardised during the Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC).

In the 20th century, written Chinese divided into two forms, known as simplified and traditional. Simplified Chinese was developed to make the characters easier to write and memorise – it is now the standard written form of the language. Traditional Chinese is still used in Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as by calligraphy artists.

Which countries have Chinese as a national language?

Mandarin is the official language of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan. It is one of four official languages in Singapore, and one of the six official languages of the United Nations. Cantonese remains one of the official languages of the special administrative regions of China – Hong Kong (with English) and Macau (with Portuguese). It is also widely spoken in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong (where it originated), as well as in overseas communities (eg in Malaysia).

Of all the Chinese dialects, only Mandarin and Cantonese are designated as official.

How many people speak Chinese as their first language?

Chinese – in one or other of its varieties – is spoken as a first language by over one billion people. This is around a fifth of the world’s total population. Of these, over 900 million speak Mandarin.

Did you know…

• There are over 50,000 Chinese characters, although only around 10,000 are in common use today. A knowledge of 2,000 characters is defined as functional literacy among Chinese workers, while well-educated readers would typically recognise around 4-6,000 characters.
• Chinese characters can be written in any direction on a square grid. Traditionally the language was written in columns, from top to bottom, right to left, with no punctuation. From the mid-20th century, left to right writing, punctuation and rows began to appear. Shop signs can be particularly confusing, as traditional and modern layouts are both common.
• Chinese characters once formed the basis for the writing systems of Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Today written Japanese is a composite of Chinese characters and syllabic Japanese scripts (kana). Chinese characters are rarely used in South Korea now, and not at all in North Korea (replaced with the Hangul alphabet). Vietnamese now uses a Latin-based alphabet.

The Chinese economy

China is the world’s second largest economy, after the United States. It is the world’s fastest-growing economy, averaging growth rates of around 10% per year for the past 30 years.

China is the largest manufacturing economy in the world, the largest exporter and the second largest importer.

However, it also remains a developing country, with the second highest number of poor people in the world after India. Over a million Chinese people live below the national poverty line of RMB 2,300 per year (about $1.8 per day).