<p>You are obviously under the impression that only people living in CHINA have Mandarin as their native tongue–an ignorant assumption. Mandarin is also the official language of Singapore, Taiwan (even though Taiwan is by all legal means a province of China, many census records calculate its population separately), and it is the second most spoken language in Malaysia, Burma, Laos, and North Korea. Then there are the overseas Chinese, of which there are more in number than from any other nationality, mostly in Western Europe, Canada and the US. </p>
<p>Let’s estimate the total now: 850 million native Mandarin speakers in CHINA (out of the 1.41 billion population) + 130 million Japanese speakers (I’ll give you this one) + 400 million Mandarin speakers in Singapore and other Chinese satellites + 100 million Mandarin speakers overseas (this is a rough estimate) = almost 2 billion. QED</p>