Mandarin is not the only Chinese language. It's the standard dialect, but there are a range of other dialects and languages spoken in the country that derive fr

Mandarin is not the only Chinese language. It's the standard dialect, but there are a range of other dialects and languages spoken in the country that derive from Old Chinese, and which share a significant cultural heritage. This gets even murkier, because Chinese is not written phonetically, so even people who do not speak a common language or dialect can still communicate using the common writing system. All this is to say that Chinese identity is not as closely bound to speaking Mandarin as one might think.