1.2 billion native speakers
Chinese is a collective term for a group of languages. The word Chinese is generally used to refer to Standard Mandarin, the official language of the People's Republic of China and of Taiwan, and one of the official languages of Singapore.
Chinese is spoken by about 1.22 billion people, mostly in China (simplified characters) and Taiwan (traditional characters), as well as in other countries of the Far East and elsewhere in the world.
Source: Wikipedia