China Says 85 Percent of Citizens Will Use Mandarin by 2025

Students attend a class at Nagqu No. 2 Senior High School, a public boarding school in Lhasa, Tibet, on June 1, 2021. Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo

BEIJING—The Chinese regime is launching an aggressive campaign to promote Mandarin, saying 85 percent of its citizens will use the national language by 2025.

The move appears to put threatened Chinese regional dialects such as Cantonese and Hokkien under even greater pressure, along with minority languages such as Tibetan, Mongolian, and Uyghur.