🇨🇳What does China require?

Everyday topic

China's constitution never uses the phrase "official language". Language appears in three separate places, and the scattering is itself the answer. Article 4, in the chapter on nationalities, says every nationality has the freedom to use and develop its own spoken and written language and to preserve or reform its own customs. Article 19 — which is the article about education — ends, after paragraphs on universal compulsory schooling and on secondary and higher education, with a single line: the state promotes the nationally used Putonghua. In the architecture of the constitution, in other words, promoting the standard language is not a status clause about language at all; it is an educational task. Article 121 then supplies the operational side: organs of self-government in national autonomous areas use, in performing their functions, the one or several languages in common use in that locality, as prescribed by its own autonomy regulations. Freedom in the nationalities chapter, promotion in the education chapter, actual use in the autonomy chapter — and nowhere a sentence beginning "the official language of the state is".