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Vernacular Chinese is a style or register of the written Chinese language essentially modeled after the spoken language and associated with Standard Mandarin. This term is not to be confused with the various present-day vernacular spoken varieties of Chinese. Since the early 1920s, Vernacular Chinese has been the most popular style of writing for speakers of all varieties of spoken Chinese throughout China, succeeding Classical Chinese, the former written standard used in China since the time of Confucius. The term Standard Written Chinese now often refers to Vernacular Chinese.

During the Zhou Dynasty, Old Chinese was the spoken and written form of Chinese, and was used to write classical Chinese texts. Starting from the Qin Dynasty, however, spoken Chinese began to evolve faster than the evolution of written Chinese. The difference gradually grew larger with the passage of time. By the time of the Tang and Song dynasties, people began to write in their vernacular dialects in the form of bianwen (traditional Chinese: 變文; simplified Chinese: 变文; pinyin: biànwén; literally "altered language") and yulu (traditional Chinese: 語錄; simplified Chinese: 语录; pinyin: yǔlù; literally "language record"), and the spoken language was completely distinct from the still-maintained written standard of Classical Chinese. Those not educated in Classical Chinese—almost the entirety of the population—could understand only very little of the language. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, vernacular dialects began to be used in novels, but were not generally used in formal writing, which continued to use Classical Chinese.

Jin Shengtan, who edited several novels in vernacular Chinese, is widely regarded as the pioneer of literature in the vernacular style. However, it was not until after the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and the promotion by scholars and intellectuals such as Cornell educated libertarian Hu Shi, Japanese educated leftist Lu Xun, founder of Chinese Communist Party Chen Duxiu, and leftist Qian Xuantong that Vernacular Chinese, or Bai hua, gained widespread importance. In particular, The True Story of Ah Q by Lu Xun is generally accepted as the first modern work to fully utilize the vernacular language^[1].

Classical Chinese became increasingly viewed as an archaic fossil hindering education and literacy, and, many suggested, social and national progress by the politically left. The works of Lu Xun and other writers of fiction and non-fiction did much to advance this view. Vernacular Chinese soon came to be viewed as mainstream by most people. Along with the growing popularity of vernacular writing in books in this period was the acceptance of punctuation, modeled after that used in Western languages (traditional Chinese literature was almost entirely unpunctuated), and the use of Arabic numerals.

Since the late 1920s, nearly all Chinese newspapers, books, and official and legal documents have been written in Vernacular Chinese. However, the tone or register and the choice of vocabulary may be formal or informal, depending on the context. Generally, the more formal the register of Vernacular Chinese, the greater the resemblance to Classical Chinese. Since the transition, it has been, however, extremely rare for a text to be written in predominantly Classical Chinese. Only educated speakers have full reading comprehension of Classical texts, and very few are able to write proficiently in Classical Chinese. Classical Chinese is taught throughout mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau although they operate in completely different education systems. However, proficiency differs greatly among these jurisdictions. Proficiency of Classical Chinese is higher among high school graduates in Taiwan^{[citation needed]}.

See Chinese grammar for the grammar of the modern standard written language, which is Vernacular Chinese.

Some other vernacular variants of Chinese, notably Cantonese, Shanghainese and Hokkien / Taiwanese (Min Nan), include additional and adapted characters for writing texts that reflect the language as spoken. Unlike Vernacular Chinese, these written forms have not been standardized and are used in informal contexts only. They are most commonly used in commercial advertisements and legal records to accurately record dialogue and colloquial expressions.

• Chinese poetry