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Mandarin Chinese^[a][b] is the primaryformalChinese language taught academically to students inChinese Filipino private schools (historically established by and meant forChinese Filipinos)^[4] and additionally across otherprivate andpublic schools, universities, and institutions in thePhilippines,^[5] especially as the formalwritten Chinese language.

BothStandard Chinese (PRC) andTaiwanese Mandarin (ROC) are taught and spoken in the Philippines depending on the school, with some schools usingsimplified Chinese characters, some usingtraditional Chinese characters, and some using a mixture of both. Meanwhile, Chinese-language publications have traditionally used traditional Chinese characters. In modern times, it is usually predominantly writtenhorizontally left-to-right (or traditionally right-to-left), but some schools, such asChiang Kai Shek College, etc., and newspapers, such asUnited Daily News, sometimes traditionally write itvertically as well. Mandarin in the Philippines is typically known in Mandarinsimplified Chinese:华语;traditional Chinese:華語;pinyin:Huáyǔ;Zhuyin Fuhao:ㄏㄨㄚˊ ㄩˇ and typically inPhilippine HokkienChinese:國語;Pe̍h-ōe-jī:kok-gí.

Mandarin Chinese is formally used inprint publications in Chinese-languagenewspapers and books in the Philippines, such asWorld News,United Daily News,Chinese Commercial News, and many others.

Mandarin in the Philippines can be classified into two distinct Mandarin dialects:Standard Mandarin andColloquial Mandarin. Standard Mandarin is either the standard language ofmainland China orTaiwan, while Colloquial Mandarin in the Philippines tends to combine features fromMandarin (simplified Chinese:华语;traditional Chinese:華語) and features fromHokkien (閩南語) of the localPhilippine Hokkien dialect, which is theheritage language of manyChinese Filipinos.^[4]

Only a small minority of Chinese Filipinos claim Mandarin as their native first language, withFilipino (Tagalog) orEnglish or Philippine Hokkien typically being the first language.^[4][6] The lack of environment for speaking the language and the difficulty of learning it created not just a lack of interest, but even great disgust by some towards it.^[4]

Efforts in the 21st century to promote Mandarin Chinese education in Chinese Filipino institutions and recent utilitarian trends, such as more Mandarin job opportunities, recent immigrants from China or Taiwan, summer education trips to China or Taiwan, encouragement of universities and schools by past presidents, and education exchange deals with China have spurred interest and potential for growth in the usage of Mandarin.^[7][4]

Sometimes Chinese Filipinos alsocode-switch Mandarin together with other languages, such asEnglish,Tagalog (or otherPhilippine languages), and Hokkien, as a form ofpidgin language, just likeHokaglish orSinglish.^{[4][failed verification]}

There are about 150 or soChinese schools that exist throughout thePhilippines, around a third of which operate inMetro Manila.^[8][9] Most education ofStandard Chinese (Mandarin) provided in the Philippines is facilitated throughChinese Filipino schools established byChinese Filipinos, which typically include the teaching of Standard Chinese (Mandarin) in one or multiple Chinese class subjects depending on the school, along with otherschool class subjects taught in English or Filipino (Tagalog) depending on the class subject.

The earliest evident record ofMandarin Chinese in the Philippines, excluding the earliestClassical Chinese texts printed in the Philippines by the Spanish friars, are from manuscripts made by theSpanish friars studying Chinese during the 1600s-1700s, such as theDictionario Hispanico Sinicum (1626-1642), which primarily studiedHokkien Chinese in the Philippines but also additionally started to addromanizedMandarin Chinese sourced from theirSangley Chinese informants, whether in earlySpanish Philippines or from lateMing China, which back then centuries ago, the Spaniards had not fully understood yet the differences between theChinese language family.

Historically, the first and oldestChinese school in the Philippines, theAnglo-Chinese School「小呂宋華僑中西學堂」(modern-dayTiong Se Academy), was founded on April 15, 1899 byEngracio Palanca Tan Kang,^[4] the son ofCarlos Palanca Tan Quien Sien, theGobernadorcillo de losSangleyes orCapitan chino ofBinondo (Manila Chinatown) and the first actingconsul general ofQing China to the Philippines,^[10] just after the end of theSpanish colonial era and the early months of thePhilippine-American War during the start of theAmerican colonial era. It first held classes at the backyard of theImperial ChineseConsulate-General, with only about twenty students when it first opened. Its initial curriculum was the study of theChinese classics,letter writing (尺牘) inChinese characters, and how to use theChinese abacus (珠算) with thelanguage of instruction initially mainly monolingually inHokkien, sometimes with someEnglish, mainly studying the reading and writing ofClassical Chinese (漢文,HokkienPe̍h-ōe-jī:Hàn-bûn) andChinese mathematics (算術,Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Soàn-su̍t;數學,Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Sò͘-ha̍k) with books and teachers mainly imported fromSouthern Fujian, closely serving the needs of the local Hokkien-speaking Chinese community of the Philippines. It served to increaseliteracy in a time of widespread illiteracy for practical purposes such as to be able to readChinese characters via reading the Chinese classics for higher learning, write in Chinese characters to be able to write letters to mail to family, friends, or business purposes, and do mathematics with theabacus for business purposes, such asaccounting andfinance.^[11]

The gradual shift to the modern curriculum of teachingMandarin in the Philippines came mainly around the founding of theRepublic of China (ROC) around 1912 after the1911 Xinhai Revolution ended theQing dynasty in China. During the early 20th century in 1902,Imperial Japan had initiated a standardized form of theJapanese language, known inJapanese:國語（こくご）,romanized: kokugo,lit. 'national language', which inspired reformers of the Qing bureaucracy in China, enough that in 1909, the Qing education ministry officially proclaimed theNanking-basedlate imperial Mandarin too inMandarinChinese:國語;Wade–Giles:kuo²-yü³;lit. 'national language', which its status continued even after the fall of the Qing dynasty, only decades later gradually switching to the modernBeijing-basedMandarin. During the early 20th century American colonial era in the Philippines, newly founded Chinese schools gradually adopted the modern curriculum from China, which included Chinese language, history, geography, math, and sciences, which the language of instruction shifted from monolingual Hokkien to bilingual Hokkien and Mandarin instruction, where initially the Hokkien-speakingFilipino-Chinese teacher would primarily read and explain Chinese texts in Hokkien, whilst simultaneously teaching how it is read in Mandarin for the average Hokkien-speakingFilipino-Chinese student back then, since Mandarin was the official"national language" of ROC, often translated as"Chinese language" from an outside-China perspective. Mandarin Chinese was known back then during the founding of ROC to even now inPhilippine HokkienChinese:國語;Pe̍h-ōe-jī:kok-gí;lit. 'national language', while inMandarinChinese:華語;Zhuyin Fuhao:ㄏㄨㄚˊ ㄩˇ;lit. 'Chinese language', since formally there is a risk of confusion to which country a word that means 'national language' is in reference to.[4] Chinese textbooks as used in Chinese schools in the Philippines during the early 20th century usually did not include any romanization, besides Chinese characters, but it was also the period whenZhuyin Fuhao / Bopomofo was first introduced and taught in Chinese schools in the Philippines, usually known inPhilippine HokkienChinese:國音;Pe̍h-ōe-jī:kok-im, after the system's first name inMandarinChinese:國音字母;Wade–Giles:kuo²-yin¹ tzŭ⁴-mu³;Zhuyin Fuhao:ㄍㄨㄛˊ ㄧㄣㄗˋ ㄇㄨˇ;lit. 'national pronunciation alphabet'. During theSecond Sino-Japanese War in 1937, it also spurred more refugees and migrants from China to migrate to American-era Philippines, enough that many were educated folk from China that became the Chinese teachers in the new Chinese schools being founded.^[11]

During the early 20th century, some Chinese schools in the Philippines also initially added an English class to keep pace with the increasing formal usage ofEnglish, which Philippine society gradually adopted under and after theAmerican colonial era. This led to the Chinese schools later adopting a dual curriculum, where there were two independent divisions known as theEnglish Division and theChinese Division, where each division was held in the morning or afternoon. The Chinese division was patterned after the curriculum standards of primary and secondary education established by the ROC government, while the English division followed the curriculum standards of the primary and secondary education required by theDepartment of Public Instruction (modern-dayDepartment of Education (DepEd)) of American-era Philippines. The system had issues with duplicated subjects such as mathematics and science which were taught once in English and also another time in the Chinese curriculum.^[4] This dual curriculum system though made it so the education then produced trilingual then later quadrilingual students, as the Chinese division used both Hokkien and Mandarin, while the English division initially used English. By theCommonwealth era of the Philippines,Tagalog was proclaimed by Pres.Manuel Quezon on December 31, 1937 as the basis of theNational Language (Tagalog:Wikang Pambansâ) of the Philippines. This made it so, the English division additionally added a Tagalog class as well, which duringJapanese occupation inWW2, the teaching of Tagalog, Philippine history, and personal character education was given priority instead of English. The Chinese division typically included class subjects like math, science, history, geography, civics, ethics, etc., wherein Mandarin was mainly used in Chinese language class and Chinese literature class, where Chinese teachers mainly read Chinese texts and words in Mandarin and explained them in Hokkien. Class subjects though such as mathematics and sciences in the Chinese division were mainly taught in Hokkien. During this time, Chinese language, literature, and mathematics, were mainly taught viarote memorization, known inPhilippine HokkienChinese:死讀;Pe̍h-ōe-jī:sí-tha̍k, where teachers pointed to a picture of an object or animal, then recited the Mandarin vocabulary words together side-by-side their equivalent Hokkien words in Chinese language class, which students were expected to repeatedly recite and orally memorize (e.g. teacher points to afly, students recite:苍蝇;tsʻang¹-ying²;ㄘㄤ ㄧㄥˊ,胡蠅;hô͘-sîn; teacher points to amosquito, students recite:蚊子;wên²-tzŭ⁵;ㄨㄣˊ ˙ㄗ;蠓;báng), then for Chinese mathematics class, themultiplication tables were mainly memorized in Hokkien (e.g. "2 × 1 = 2, 2 × 2 = 4, 2 × 3 = 6" are read inPhilippine HokkienChinese:二 × 一 = 二，二 × 二 = 四，二 × 三 = 六;Pe̍h-ōe-jī:lī-it lī, lī-lī sì, lī-saⁿ la̍k).^[11]

AfterWW2 andde-jurePhilippine independence from the United States in 1946, the newly independentPhilippine government around the start of theCold War era signed theSino-Philippine Treaty of Amity in April 18, 1947 with the ROC government still based in mainland China, which explicitly stated that ROC citizens are allowed to establish schools in the Philippines to educate their children. This made it so Chinese schools in the Philippines from then on were officially under the purview of the Republic of China (ROC) and Chinese schools and teachers had to register with the ROC embassy in the Philippines back then for supervision of the Chinese departments of each school and for teachers to get a certificate to teach, while the other subject departments were registered and supervised by the Philippine government'sDepartment of Education (DepEd). In 1949, thePeople's Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed by theChinese Communist Party (CCP) and the ROC government under theKuomintang (KMT) and its remaining armed forces and refugeesretreated to Taiwan as a result of theChinese Civil War. The Philippine government continued to recognize theRepublic of China in Taiwan and the 1947 treaty, which let the ROCMinistry of Education in Taiwan continue to supervise the Chinese department of Chinese schools in the Philippines and begin to provide Chinese textbooks coming from Taiwan. After the retreat of the ROC government under theKMT in 1949, theWhite Terror began uponMartial law in Taiwan for the KMT to solidify rule and quash dissidents after the end ofImperial Japanese rule over Taiwan. The martial law era of Taiwan saw the promotion of Mandarin with a monolingualMandarinlanguage policy as part of the KMT's consolidation of power in Taiwan via de-Japanization and promotion of national unity against its ideological rival in mainland China. The ROC government encouraged Mandarin as a national language that would serve as a lingua franca for all groups in Taiwan and heavily discouraged any other with harsh policies, for its ambition of national unity and patriotism through standardizing Mandarin as a means to prove that the newly establishedRepublic of China in Taiwan is more superior and united than thePeople’s Republic of China. The ROC government in Taiwan intensified this campaign not just in Taiwan but also propagated this to overseas Chinese communities, such as to the Chinese departments of the Chinese schools in the Philippines. Around roughly the 1950s-1970s depending on the school, the Chinese departments of different Chinese schools in the Philippines were to teach Chinese language, history, geography, and mathematics exclusively only in Mandarin.^[11]

Likewise, after the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) across the late 20th century, it also made efforts in mainland China topromote Mandarin as Standard Chinese under theState Language Commission established in 1949 to facilitate easier communication throughout the country using Mandarin as a nationallingua franca. In 1955, the PRC government ofMainland China also renamed the name of Mandarin inMandarinsimplified Chinese:国语;traditional Chinese:國語;pinyin:Guóyǔ;lit. 'national language' intoMandarinsimplified Chinese:普通话;traditional Chinese:普通話;pinyin:Pǔtōnghuà;lit. 'common speech', although the former is still widely used in Taiwan. The concept of a dichotomy inChinese characters withSimplified Chinese characters vsTraditional Chinese characters was introduced by the PRC through several rounds of mass standardization and simplification throughout the late 20th century, particularly1956,1964,1977,1988,2013. TheHanyu Pinyin romanization system forMandarinStandard Chinese was also first introduced and taught in 1958 in mainland China, then adopted in 1980 in Singapore, and in 2009 in Taiwan. Likewise inSingapore, there was also aSpeak Mandarin Campaign from 1979 and beyond by thePromote Mandarin Council of theSingapore government to promote a united Chinese mother-tongue lingua franca for Singapore'sChinese Singaporean population. InMalaysia, Mandarin is also taught as the only Chinese language taught and regulated by theChinese Language Standardisation Council of Malaysia under theMinistry of Education of Malaysia for the Chinese schools there forChinese Malaysians. Likewise, otherChinese schools throughoutSoutheast Asia also followed suit in teaching Mandarin as the Chinese class, such as inIndonesia forChinese Indonesians. In Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and likewise in the Philippines as well, Chinese schools prefer to call Mandarin Standard Chinese inMandarinsimplified Chinese:华语;traditional Chinese:華語;pinyin:Huáyǔ;Zhuyin Fuhao:ㄏㄨㄚˊ ㄩˇ;lit. 'Chinese language' due to the risk of confusion to which country or community a word that means 'national language' (國語) or 'common speech' (普通话) is in reference to.

In 1972, Pres.Ferdinand Marcos Sr. declaredMartial law in the Philippines and later promulgated the1973 constitution, which banned the ownership and operation of alien schools, which were to be phased out in 4 years. The Chinese schools in the Philippines were to be nationalized and became legally Philippineprivate schools. From a maximum of 160 minutes per day in grade one and two of elementary school and max of 200 minutes per day in high school were all to be reduced to only a maximum of 120 minutes per day only for the teaching of Chinese language class. The names of the schools were also to remove the word "Chinese", which some schools decided to change their school names with Hokkien transcriptions or reworded them to keep their school acronyms by changing the word "Chinese" in their name to another word that started with the letter "C", such as"Cultural", "Central", "Chung Hua", "Chong Hua", "Community", "Christian", "Catholic", "City", "Citizen", "Confucius", "Chamber", etc. There was also a maximum ratio of alien students to be only at one-third, which Chinese schools were able to easily meet by 1974, since the naturalization process was liberalized which caused a mass naturalization of Filipino Chinese (then only withpermanent residency and usuallyROC,British Hong Kong,Portuguese Macau, and somePRC citizenship), converting many intoChinese Filipinos (withPhilippine citizenship) in 1974. There were also some Chinese schools and especially the ROC embassy that resisted the nationalization, citing their service in education, provision of local employment, their high English education standards, and the 1947Sino-Philippine Treaty of Amity, which increasingly became no longer applicable as the Chinese school owners now mostly receivedPhilippine citizenship after the mass naturalization of 1974. The Chinese schools were nationalized due to previous debates on the direction and focus of education of Chinese schools due to the strong focus on China in the Chinese curriculum, which the older generations tended to be fine with, but the younger generation students during the late 20th century who were typically born and raised in the Philippines increasingly saw little relevance of the Chinese subject matters to their daily lives in the Philippines and had very little idea of the Chinese society in either mainland China or Taiwan. Students and even the Chinese schools themselves saw they had no hand in the designing of the Chinese curriculum controlled by the ROC government, enough that some Chinese schools in the Philippines during the mid-1960s already decided to break away from the system of ROC supervision, such as someJesuit-run Chinese schools likeXavier school among others, which applied beforehand to be classified as Philippine schools instead of Chinese schools to not be accredited under the ROC system, primarily because they were tired of the redundantCold War-fueled internecine KMT vs communist political antagonisms that mattered little in the Philippine setting. This policy of nationalizing Chinese schools gave way to in-house Philippine Chinese textbooks teaching Mandarin being made locally in the Philippines to orient to the Philippine setting and the elimination of textbooks imposed from Taiwan that contained KMT political propaganda.^[4]

In 1975, the Philippine government officially recognized andopened diplomatic relations with thePeople's Republic of China (PRC), especially after theRepublic of China (ROC) lost its seat in 1971 as "China" in the United Nations. The seat of theChinese embassy in the Philippines was transferred to the hands of the PRC, while the Republic of China (ROC) based in Taiwan instead opened theTaipei Economic and Cultural Office in the Philippines as its de facto embassy instead.

Due to the limit of 120 minutes per day introduced by the nationalization, different schools divided up their curriculums in various ways, some had two 1-hour Chinese classes per day, some had three 40-minute Chinese classes, with some dedicating it all to only Chinese language, or some having half the daily Chinese classes as Chinese composition (綜合,Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Chong-ha̍p) which was a combination of Chinese history, geography, and culture. Some also still hadChinese mathematics (數學,Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Sò͘-ha̍k) and some hadChinese calligraphy (毛筆,Pe̍h-ōe-jī:Mô͘-pit), which the Chinese curriculums tended to vary per school, which the weekly schedule per class section were also variously portioned throughout the school year depending on the school's curriculum per semester or quarter. Sometimes, the allotted time limit was informally exceeded as well, but this typically took up the time of the next class which was not necessarily a Chinese class anymore. In some cases, there were still a few that maintained the dual curriculum set up where afternoons were devoted entirely for Chinese classes, though not as lengthily anymore compared to pre-nationalization years.^[4]

Besides the in-house Philippine Chinese textbooks, the sets of textbooks used tended to vary over the years as well depending on different schools, which there are at least 4 or more sets of textbooks used by different Chinese schools in the Philippines, two of whom were prepared by theTaipei Economic and Cultural Office, which is the de facto Taiwan embassy, then another was prepared byPhilippine Cultural College (PCC), and another was also prepared byXavier school for theJesuit-run Catholic Chinese schools, then possibly more sets of textbooks over the years as well in various other schools. For decades as well since the late 20th century to the 21st century, most Chinese schools did not change much in their methods of teaching Mandarin, while Philippine society increasingly became primarily more English and Tagalog speaking. Chinese Filipino schools still often use the first language approach, which assumes that students of Chinese Filipino schools have had native experience of Mandarin, despite the contrary. There has been a deterioration and stagnation in the Mandarin Chinese education in Chinese schools in the Philippines over the years, due to the lack of environment for speaking the language outside school and the difficulty of learning it as Chinese teachers themselves are low in supply in the Philippines and typically have no degree in education to teach Chinese, which creates not just a lack of interest, but even great disgust by some towards it, especially since the Chinese education system in the Philippines usually produces graduates too lacking in Mandarin for effective interactions with Mandarin speakers abroad. The solution pursued by some families was to send their kids to study Mandarin abroad, but in the 1980s-1990s, only very few negligible number usually go out their way to have their kids continue their Chinese education abroad likely due to the impractical high cost for each family. For the Chinese schools themselves, there were attempts to revise the Chinese textbooks, which just ended up with more sets of non-uniform textbooks across different schools, then there were efforts as well for teachers' training but it itself had an underlying shortage in supply of Mandarin teachers to fuel it. The immediate solution mainly pursued to mitigate the problem in past decades of the late 20th to 21st century was to import teachers from abroad initially from Taiwan, then also mainland China as of 2003. It proved only to be a band aid solution as the problem encountered there though during the 1990s-2000s was that the foreign Chinese teachers usually could not communicate well, due to their own lack of English and Tagalog fluency, and usually fail to understand the local culture and behavior of Chinese Filipino students to properly teach and appropriately grade them.^[11] Across the 21st century, there have been more students going abroad to study Mandarin, but the terms of study they enroll in are still only short and limited only to gain a bit more fluency to be able to learn enough to do business with Mandarin speakers, but they usually do not come back as well planning to teach.^[4]

In 1991, some wealthy Chinese Filipinos donated funds to set up thePhilippine Chinese Education Research Center (PCERC) in order to address the deterioration of the Philippine Chinese education system, via education method reform, training teachers, and developing suitable teaching materials. It tried to push for the teaching of Mandarin Chinese as asecond language, rather than the first language approach, and encouraged the use and teaching of thePinyin romanization system rather than the traditionalZhuyin fuhao phonetic system.^[4]

In terms of phonology, vocabulary and grammar, the "Chinese" (Mandarin) taught during most of the 20th century in the Philippines in many older Chinese Filipino schools often varied and is somewhat reminiscent sometimes ofTaiwanese Mandarin, but ever since the late 20th to 21st century, different Chinese Filipino schools now also teachBeijing-basedMandarinStandard Chinese as well. As a result of the history, older Chinese schools in the Philippines still typically teachtraditional Chinese characters and theZhuyin phonetic system or some used to teach it but now shifted tosimplified Chinese characters or teaching both depending on the school. In recent decades around the late 20th century to early 2000s depending on the school, many schools started to shift to usingsimplified Chinese characters and thePinyin phonetic system instead ever since the Philippine government recognition of the PRC and the introduction of books and teaching materials from mainland China and sometimes Singapore started to be used and taught. In the 21st century, many Chinese Filipino schools now currently teach Chinese (Mandarin) in simplified characters with the Pinyin system, modeled after those in China and Singapore, though some older schools still teach both or either of the systems, where a few still remain teaching solely intraditional Chinese characters and the Zhuyin phonetic system or teach a mixture of simplified and traditional characters with pinyin. Chinese (Mandarin)newspapers in the Philippines, such asWorld News,United Daily News,Chinese Commercial News, and many others still mostly use traditional Chinese characters in writing. Due to the selection by the founders and sponsors of different Chinese schools, many schools now either teach using simplified Chinese characters only, traditional Chinese characters only, or a mixture of both.^[12] Many Chinese Filipino schools either use pinyin and/orbopomofo (zhuyin fuhao) to teach the language.^[4]

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