One of the tricky things about ministry to Chinese people is that Chinese people don't speak Chinese. But rather, they speak all sorts of different dialects depending on where they are from. For this post I'll just focus on the 2 main Chinese languages: Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as English.

This is the primary language spoken in the homes of Chinese people (click on the graph for a larger image):

Cantonese	Mandarin	English
15,443	13,206	2,278

A few observations:

• The number of Mandarin speakers are catching up to the number of Cantonese speakers. This means we need to put as many resources into Mandarin ministry as Cantonese ministry (if not more).
  
• There are more Mandarin speakers in the 20-34 age range, which reflects the increase in overseas students and young families from China in recent years.
  
• There are more Cantonese speakers in the 5-19 and 40+ age range, which reflects the longer history of migration from Hong Kong.
  
• Only 7.4% of people speak English at home.

From this, it is obvious that churches with Cantonese and/or Mandarin ministries have a big role to play. And this will help in selecting areas to target (click on the map for a larger image):



Both language groups are heavily concentrated in Hurstville, but you can also see that Cantonese speakers are much more spread out, with significant concentration in Kingsgrove, Beverly Hills and Riverwood. On the other hand, Mandarin speakers have less of a spread, with significant concentration in Kogarah, Rockdale and Turrella, and a bit in Riverwood.

Although not many speak English at home, I think that English ministry still has an important role in reaching Chinese people. More on that in my next post.

Pray for the churches who are seeking to reach Chinese people in their mother tongue. Pray that there will be solid preaching of the gospel and strong, biblical discipleship of new believers that will lay a firm foundation for ministry in the long term.