Is Chinese a single language?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Chinese is a single language

Pro

• Pro From the writing system perspective, Chinese would be a single language. Thus, if we disregard pronunciation and only observe the language production as manifested in writing, the mutual unintelligibility of the dialects or varieties disappears or becomes greatly reduced. (Needs a double check by an expert or a good sourcing.)
  • Objection In a human language, pronunciation precedes writing and appears more constitutive of it than writing.
    •  Comment On the other hand, for the purpose of creating an information system of languages, which necessarily depends on writing rather than pronunciation (especially when the writing does not correspond to pronunciation but rather has it origin in something like idea-script or concept-script), it may turn eminently practical to treat Chinese as a single language. This would explain why e.g. Google Translate has "Chinese (Traditional)" and "Chinese (Simplified)" but no "Mandarin", and similar treatment is in Bing translator.
      •  Comment Since, according to Britannica, certain variety of Mandarin is the basis for Modern Standard Chinese, it could be that these translation services actually work with Modern Standard Chinese or Chinese/Mandarin rather than Chinese as encompassing e.g. Cantonese; requires clarification. In any case, in the direction from e.g. English to Chinese, these translation services do not allow the user to indicate whether the target is Mandarin or Cantonese, and since there are some--even if small--vocabulary differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, the use of Modern Standard Chinese by these services seems plausible enough.

Con

• Con Since the putative dialects of Chinese are not mutually intelligible, they are not part of a single language. (For instance, Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible.)
• Con Chinese is treated as multiple languages by Britannica and Asia Society. That is not conclusive but is suggestive.

Further reading

• Chinese language, wikipedia.org
• Chinese languages, britannica.com
• Chinese Language, asiasociety.org -- "Chinese itself is not a single language, but a language family like the Romance language family to which French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Swiss Romansch belong."
• The Many Dialects of China, asiasociety.org -- "The most prominent example is probably Cantonese and Mandarin, which are both considered Chinese but are completely unintelligible to each other. It is also worth noting that accents also arise within dialects, due to regional differences in the sphere of a dialect’s use."
• Why do people say Chinese isn't a language?, quora.com
• Chinese | Silk Roads Programme, en.unesco.org