Functional categories in Mandarin Chinese examines the internal structure of Chinese functional projections, such as TP, CP, NegP, DisP etc. within the framework of the Minimalist Program. It compares some of these categories, as they occur in Chinese, with their counterparts in other languages. This comparison aims at providing a principled explanation for some of the crosslinguistic differences that one can attest. The main goal of this study is to show that if a certain type of functional category is a theoretical requirement (because there are languages that have been shown to have it), it will be part of Universal Grammar and thus be manifested in each individual language. As will be shown, linguistic variation can best be explained in terms of strong versus weak features, in the sense of Chomsky (1993).