I thought China wanted more people who could read and write code?

Nobody codes in Mandarin! No, not even Chinese people.

They code in English and for a reason! It’s not a great or reassuring reason, but it’s a logical one: English doesn’t have any accent marks and a simple, 26-character alphabet. This means the meaning of code can be understood by a compiler or interpreter without having to deal with encodings or enormous lookup tables to determine if a character is valid for say, an assignment (e.g. foo = 1).

I’ve met developers that tried coding in their native languages using Python, which is one of the few languages that actually supports using non-latin Unicode characters and even right-to-left writing. They all say the same thing: It sucks and it’s not worth the trouble.