China is a huge country.  Within its borders, it has many different types of terrain, many types of people, and many languages.  Aside from minority ethnic languages like Tibetan, Mongolian, and Hmong, there is also a bewildering variety of Chinese "dialects" across the country, some of which cannot be understood even by people living in adjacent towns.  You may have heard of "Cantonese," which is spoken in the far south, or "Taiwanese," spoken on the island of Taiwan.  Neither of these is intelligible to outsiders.  How do Chinese people all talk to one another?


The answer is by using a standard language that everybody from all over the country learns at school.  This standard language is based on the speech of the capital, Beijing, and in English it is usually called Mandarin or Mandarin Chinese.  In today's China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, and among ethnic Chinese around Southeast Asia and the world, Mandarin Chinese is almost universally understood.  A Cantonese speaker from Guangzhou can go to Shanghai and speak Mandarin to local Shanghainese or people from other parts of the country and they will all understand each other.  Mandarin is the language of most television programs, and it is the universal language used in education and government.  Therefore, this is what students of Chinese learn.