For the first few years after Abudullah Urashim left his hometown in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, "2 yuan for 50 grams" was the most fluent Standard Chinese sentence that he could say. He left Xinjiang to sell raisins in east China and used this phrase to answer all questions posed by his customers.

When he and his wife left Xinjiang in 1997, Abudullah could only speak his native Uygur language, but he was confident he'd be able to learn Standard Chinese in less than three years. However, as the couple moved around between cities in east China, financial burdens and unstable living arrangements did not give him the time and energy he needed to learn the language. After three years in the east, he was still unable to converse with his customers fluently.

While his communication difficulties created a number of challenges for Abudullah, they also drew support from warm-hearted locals who saw him selling raisins on the street. Unable to understand and remember the Standard Chinese names of these locals, he saved their details into his phone contacts under titles such as "the man with the big belly," "the man with long hair" and "the man with glasses."

Changes by the language 

In 2006, Abudullah moved to Zhejiang Province to look for more business opportunities and met an older woman making and selling jianbing, a type of savory crepe, on the street. The woman taught him jianbing-making skills as well as Standard Chinese sentences, although she did so with a strong Henan accent.

Encouraged by his new skills, Abudullah went to Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi Province, to start his own business. He opened a restaurant offering Xinjiang cuisine, and in his spare time helped other Uygur people in the city to learn Standard Chinese and do business.

In May 2017, Abudullah wrote a long letter to his mother in Xinjiang, telling her about his experiences in detail and suggesting she share the letter with friends in his hometown.

The letter caught the attention of China Central Television (CCTV), which reported on the story during a morning news program. Hai Xia, a CCTV news presenter, was deeply impressed by the story. At that time, with the support of China's National Radio and Television Administration, Hai initiated a program to teach Standard Chinese to people living in poor areas, especially the areas inhabited by ethnic minorities.

"The proportion of Chinese people who speak Standard Chinese is currently 80.72 percent," Hai said at a forum on poverty governance held in Yunnan Province on May 18. "That means there are more than 280

million people in China who can't speak Standard Chinese."

Known in English as the Forever-Bond Program, Hai's initiative is known in Chinese as Shiliuzi, literally meaning pomegranate seeds. The program's Chinese name comes from President Xi Jinping's statements on quite a few occasions, calling for all ethnic groups to "embrace each other like the seeds in a pomegranate."

The project focuses primarily on preschool education as children's early years are the time at which language teaching proves most effective. The city of Kashgar in the far west of Xinjiang has become a pilot for the project. With support from the local education department, the program established a detailed plan on Standard Chinese training for preschool students and teachers. 

Between 2018 and the end of 2020, over 3,500 preschool teachers in Kashgar had participated in training courses designed by the program, benefiting over 30,000 students.

Heng Xianhua, owner of a kindergarten in Kashgar, joined a five-day training program in Beijing in May 2019. "Even though the training only lasted five days, the courses were very diverse and useful. For example, one seminar gave advice on how to help students practice Standard Chinese after-school," Heng said.

The proportion of preschool students speaking Standard Chinese in Kashgar has risen from 38 percent in 2018 to 61 percent in 2020. "Most children in kindergartens now speak Standard Chinese," Hai said. "When I visit their families, they often serve as the interpreter between me and the other family members."

A new tool 

Tamdrin, or Ding Zhen in Standard Chinese, is a Tibetan from a remote county in Sichuan Province. His angelic smile caused a stir among Chinese netizens last winter, after a photographer posted a video of him on Douyin, the domestic version of TikTok. He was soon appointed as a tourism ambassador for his hometown of Litang County.

Despite his online popularity, he had difficulties connecting with his fans as his inability to speak Standard Chinese meant fans could only talk to him through a translator. He studied Standard Chinese hard over the following months and each time he appeared on either television programs or online live streaming, his followers were surprised by their idol's improvements in Standard Chinese. On June 2, Ding was appointed by Sichuan Provincial Department of Culture and Tourism as the tourism ambassador of Sichuan Province.

"Speaking Standard Chinese helps young people from poor areas to gain a better understanding of the outside world and to explore a wider range of opportunities," Hai said. "People now say smartphones are the new farm tools and live-streaming is the new farm work. Either promoting their agricultural produce or promoting tourism in their hometowns, speaking Standard Chinese is crucial for these young people to participate in China's giant e-commerce market."

During the same forum at which Hai spoke last month in Yunnan Province, Du Lan, Senior Vice President of iFLYTEK Co. Ltd., a leading artificial intelligence and speech technology firm, shared some of the efforts the company has made to popularize Standard Chinese.

"We have developed an application with which the users can learn about 1,000 daily words and sentences," Du said, "Users can read along with the audio in our APP and get a score on their reading at the end."

The app now has over 1.02 million users, mostly in regions inhabited by China's ethnic minorities, including Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and Yunnan Province. Developers working at the company have also created Standard Chinese courses tailored for people from different linguistic backgrounds in order to better adjust their pronunciation.

Hai expects to see Standard Chinese education make increasing use of new technologies such as 5G. "Imagine if every morning we could use virtual reality technology so that children from ethnic minority backgrounds in different parts of the country can read books together," Hai said. "At night, we can use this technology to read them to sleep."

(Print Edition Title: Break the Babel Barrier) 

Copyedited by G.P. Wilson 

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