According to the Sixty Years History of Chinese (1887- 1950), the word "Chinese" came into being at the end of 19. It was a common word before liberation, but it was later used as the name of the course. 1905, after the Qing dynasty abolished the imperial examination system, it began to open new schools. At that time, all the courses and textbooks were imported from the west, and only one subject was called "Chinese", which was to teach ancient Chinese.

After the May 4th Movement, Chinese classes were challenged by advocating vernacular Chinese and opposing classical Chinese, so primary schools were changed to "national language", and the teaching materials had distinct oral characteristics, all of which were vernacular Chinese, nursery rhymes and stories.

In old China, Chinese was the abbreviation of ancient and modern written works-style and classical Chinese. Nowadays, Chinese is the name of a subject. Chinese is also a term to measure humanistic quality, which refers to the comprehensive level of people's internal speech mechanism quality and external speech technical ability. (Chen Jinhai's interpretation of Chinese)

Extended information language has different meanings in different disciplines.

In the phrase "language", language is narrow, especially spoken language. The essence of language is generalized language.

Chinese is a teaching subject in the basic education curriculum system. Its teaching content is speech culture, and its operating form is also speech culture.

Chinese is also the abbreviation of language or language literature.

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia-Chinese