Chinese (Simplified)

Modern Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing Mandarin dialect, belongs to the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, distinct from and only partially mutually intelligible with other major Chinese varieties including Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien, which linguists sometimes classify as separate languages within the same family despite the shared written tradition and political convention of calling them all dialects of one Chinese language.

The People's Republic of China introduced simplified Chinese characters in the 1950s and 1960s, reducing the stroke count of many traditional characters to promote literacy, a reform adopted in mainland China and Singapore while Taiwan, Hong Kong and most overseas Chinese communities retained traditional characters, producing today's split between two written standards representing the same underlying language. This site's row for Classical Chinese, distinct from this one, covers the older literary register used for the Confucian, Taoist and Buddhist canon; modern simplified Chinese instead reflects contemporary spoken and administrative usage, including the Chinese Communist Party's own extensive body of ideological and, at times, explicitly anti-religious publication.

Modern simplified Chinese is the language of China's state-sanctioned religious publishing apparatus, through which the government-approved Buddhist, Taoist, Islamic, Catholic and Protestant associations produce officially reviewed scripture editions, catechetical material and clergy training texts under the oversight of the Chinese Communist Party's religious affairs bureaucracy, a system distinct from the unregulated devotional Chinese-language publishing that circulates through unregistered house churches and underground Catholic communities loyal to Rome.

Chinese Christian Bible translation history includes the influential Chinese Union Version completed by Protestant missionary committees in 1919, still the most widely used Chinese Protestant Bible translation today, while Chinese Buddhist practice today draws on modern simplified-character editions of the Buddhist canon alongside the older Classical Chinese textual tradition it derives from.

Falun Gong, a religious movement founded in China in 1992 that blends qigong practice with Buddhist and Taoist elements, produced a substantial body of modern Chinese devotional literature before the government banned the movement in 1999 and launched a sustained suppression campaign against it that continues today, both inside China and, through diaspora practitioners, in Chinese-language publications distributed internationally.