China mainland or mainland China?

[jay1587]

May I ask a question?

I saw this sentence from a book with audio CD,

"the most awful thing was that I was sent to the China mainland. "

Shouldn't it be mainland China instead of China mainland?

However, the CD (read by a native English speaker, also read it as China mainland, this confuses me!

thank you for helping!

 

[probus]

All of the following are okay. I was sent to

1) the mainland of China
2) the Chinese mainland
3) mainland China
4) the China mainland.

I've given them in order of my personal preference from best to worst, but none of them are wrong.

 

[bubbha]

"(the) China mainland" is wrong.

It should be "mainland China" or perhaps "the Chinese mainland", but the style guides for publications I work for don't allow the latter.

In most cases, however, you can just use "China".

I generally limit my use of "mainland" to the term "mainland Chinese", given the ambiguity of the word "Chinese" in English (i.e., does it refer to the country, the ethnicity, the language, the culture?). After all, there are people in Malaysia who can be considered Chinese people who speak Chinese and adhere to Chinese cultural traditions, even though they are Malaysian citizens and many have never even set foot in China.

 

[Tdol]

#4 doesn't work for me.

 

[probus]

The Corpus of Contemporary American English provides nine examples of "China mainland".