On the Language Preferences of Chinese Leaders

Abstract

For centuries. attention to language problems in China has been paid at the highest level. In his speech at the 20th CPC Congress, Xi Jinping mentioned the promotion of the “all-national language and script”, i.e. Standard Mandarin and Chinese characters, as an important part of the language policy. Propaganda of traditional culture and preservation of ancient written texts is another important task in modern China. It is not by chance that soon after the 20th Congress, Xi Jinping visited Yinxu, a museum-park on the site of the second capital of the Shang-Yin dynasty, where the oldest jiaguwen character inscriptions had been discovered at the end of the 19th century. In the epoch of the revival of philological traditions, Xi Jinping’s signature in his own calligraphic version with the traditional character 習xí is widely used in Chinese propaganda. Soon after the 20th Congress, the importance of the popularization of the Chinese language and culture outside the country was discussed in Xi Jinping’s letter sent to a group of students from Saudi Arabia. As for the romanization system Hanyu Pinyin, introduced in the PRC in 1958, in the official documents it is positioned as an auxiliary device used in the primary education in China, when writing Chinese words in the texts in foreign languages and in the process of teaching Chinese to foreigners or not mentioned at all. The status of the Hanyu Pinyin system in modern China is incomparable with the status of the ancient Chinese characters.