700 million people can speak Putonghua

More than half of Chinese people can speak Putonghua (standard Chinese), while nearly 70 percent of urbanites are fluent in the spoken form, according to a survey conducted by the Ministry of Education.

The survey, which canvassed 500,000 people, showed that 53.06 percent of them can effectively communicate verbally in Putonghua. The fluency rate in cities was 66 percent while in rural areas it was 45 percent.

Although the Chinese share the same written form Chinese ideograms or characters, which have been in use for 3,000 years the pronunciation of identical characters differs from region to region. This means people who cannot communicate verbally can do so by writing Chinese characters which have the same literal meaning.