The official language of the People's Republic of China is:

The official language of the People's Republic of China is Standard Chinese, based on the Mandarin dialect, called "Putonghua" ("common speech") in China.

About Standard Chinese (Mandarin):

• It is based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect and the grammar of modern written Chinese.
• It was adopted as the national standard in 1955-56.
• It is the most spoken language in the world by number of native speakers (more than 900 million), and with second-language speakers, about 1.1 billion people speak it.
• It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations (along with Arabic, English, French, Russian and Spanish).
• It is also an official language of Taiwan (as "Guoyu") and Singapore (as "Huayu").

Features:

• It is a tonal language with four main tones; the same syllable can mean different things depending on the tone.
• It is written in Chinese characters ("hanzi"), each representing a word or a meaningful part of a word.

Mainland China uses "Simplified Chinese characters", introduced in the 1950s and 1960s to increase literacy. Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan use "Traditional Chinese characters".

"Pinyin", a system for writing Chinese sounds in the Roman alphabet, was adopted in 1958. For example, "Peking" became "Beijing" in Pinyin.

Other Chinese languages (often called dialects):

• Cantonese (Yue): spoken in Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau.
• Wu: spoken in Shanghai and nearby areas.
• Min: spoken in Fujian and Taiwan (Hokkien).
• Hakka: spoken by the Hakka people in southern China.
• Xiang and Gan: spoken in Hunan and Jiangxi.
• These are not mutually intelligible in speech, but share a common written form.

Minority languages:

• China officially recognises 56 ethnic groups.
• Languages such as Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian and Zhuang are spoken in autonomous regions.

About China:

• Its capital is Beijing; its currency is the Renminbi (Yuan).
• Its national flower is the peony (unofficial), and its national animal is the giant panda.

Why not the other options?

• ✗Cantonese is spoken in southern China and Hong Kong.
• ✗Hakka is a regional Chinese language.
• ✗Tibetan is spoken in the Tibet Autonomous Region.