Everything needs protectionI'll go with everything which you want to continue into the future needs caring for, but purity of the Chinese language seems like a strange thing to be optimizing for and expending effort on instead of, say population happiness or ability to trade with other countries or healthcare or whatever.
Who is keeping score on language purity and what makes it a metric worth doing well on?
Here, the geolocal minority language is Welsh. It is kept on life support by a smallish and dwindling number of native speakers (virtually no only-Welsh speakers remain, 600,000 people identify as Welsh speakers, but the Wikipedia article suspiciously avoids mentioning how many of those consider themselves 'fluent'), and a government mandate that all official documents, announcements, roadsigns / etc. must be in Welsh as well as English, and mandatory teaching at school.
I was wondering recently if it would be interesting to argue that forcibly teaching children a globally useless language for the sake of pleasing the adults who arbitrarily want it saved is a weak form of child abuse. It certainly isn't a form of educating children in a way that is in their best interest at least, which I'd think is a pretty strong heuristic for a useful education system.
The main out against that argument is that language education in school is so ineffective and accounts for such a small amount of time that it's hardly a thing worth complaining about against the backdrop of all the other things which could be improved.