'Shared future for mankind' a top term

The phrase "a community with a shared future for mankind" was one of the hottest phrases in China related to international topics last year, a new report shows.

President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, first proposed the idea of "a community with a shared future for mankind" at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 2013. He has mentioned the concept on many occasions at home and abroad since then.

In his work report delivered in October at the opening session of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Xi emphasized China's aspiration to build "a community with a shared future for mankind" six times.

The hottest word and phrase related to domestic topics last year were "sharing" and "original aspiration", the report found.

According to the 2018 Chinese Language Situation report, which was released by the Ministry of Education and National Language Committee of China on Tuesday, expressions such as "19th National Congress of the CPC", "New Era" and "Xiongan New Area" also were among the hottest terms last year.

Others included "roll up our sleeves to work harder", "Tianzhou-1", China's first cargo spacecraft, "artificial intelligence" and "BRICS countries".

It is the 12th time the ministry and the committee have jointly compiled and released the report on Chinese language.

Lists of popular words and phrases were based on a campaign that assessed characters used by Chinese-language media, whose organizers include the National Language Resource Monitoring and Research Center and the Commercial Press.

The campaign received thousands of proposed words and characters between Nov 20 and Dec 4 by netizens nationwide. Its website received more than 200 million clicks.

"These popular phrases, which were chosen based on netizens' votes, give a complete picture of people's lives in China last year," Tian Lixin, director of the Ministry of Education's Department of Language Application and Administration, said at a news conference about the report.

They can encourage people to record their lives and depict changes in society and the world in words, Tian said.

If these hot phrases can survive the test of time, they may even be included in the Modern Chinese Dictionary, which serves as the standard authoritative reference book, she said.