Chinglish anyone?

China and Taiwan now have a dictionary so they can read each other's signs.

Mandarin is the "official" language, but half the country speaks dialects and has to study it.

..

Chinese is distinguished by its high level of internal diversity, although all varieties of Chinese are tonal and analytic. There are between 7 and 13 main regional groups of Chinese (depending on classification scheme), of which the most spoken, by far, is Mandarin (about 850 million), followed by Wu (90 million), Cantonese (Yue) (70 million) and Min (50 million). Most of these groups are mutually unintelligible, although some, like Xiang and the Southwest Mandarin dialects, may share common terms and some degree of intelligibility.

for example, Cantonese, spoken by southern China:

Cantonese (粵語 or 廣東話) is mainly spoken in Guangdong (where Guangzhou/Canton is the capital) and Guangxi provinces and most of the overseas Chinese communities in Australia, Europe, North America and other parts of the world.

to make things worse, Cantonese has nine tones, and Mandarin four

so how to use a typewriter? you might use Pinyin or the Wubi method.

I suspect that despite the emphasis on Mandarin, the tonal problems and lack of an alphabet will prevent Mandarin from becoming a universal language...perhaps Chinglish will be the ultimate dialect a thousand years from now..