Tibetan Buddhism is practised in Tibet and other areas with Tibetan populations. Taoism is a recognized religion, as is Christianity in its various forms. The official language of China is Mandarin Chinese, the Beijing dialect. There are numerous dialects of spoken Chinese which have great tonal differences. They are not different languages, however.
All Chinese speakers share the same written language .
Written Chinese is composed of tens of thousands of characters. A knowledge of around 2,000 characters is necessary to be literate. On mainland China simplified characters are used. Traditional characters are used in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Pinyin Pinyin is the romanization of Chinese characters.