Hong Kong activists will rally on Sunday against China’s bid to champion Mandarin over Cantonese, following a rare protest for the same cause in southern China.
Organizers have called on supporters via Facebook to help protect their mother tongue, after hundreds protested in support of Cantonese in Guangzhou last weekend, defying government orders.
The demonstrations follow official advice issued to southern Chinese TV stations proposing they switch key shows into Mandarin from Cantonese.
Choi Suk-fong (蔡淑芳), one of the organizers of the Hong Kong protest, said Beijing’s moves to promote Mandarin were a form of suppression of the rights of minorities in the country.
“Cantonese was often portrayed as a second-class language when Hong Kong was under British colonial rule,” she said. “Sadly, the use of our mother tongue is now being attacked again, only this time the perpetrator is our Chinese government.”
The People’s Political Consultative Conference wrote this month to Guangzhou Province’s bureaucrats proposing that local TV stations broadcast their prime-time shows in Mandarin instead of Cantonese ahead of the Asian Games in November.
Officials were quoted as saying that adopting Mandarin would promote unity, “forge a good language environment” and cater to non-Cantonese-speaking Chinese visitors at the huge sporting event.
Rally organizers wrote on the event’s Facebook page: “I believe we can gather 100,000 people to stop China’s evil act of promoting Mandarin and destroying Cantonese!!!”
More than 150 visitors to the Facebook page had signed up for the protest by yesterday afternoon, including some from Guangzhou.
Many of the demonstrators in Guangzhou were young people wearing T-shirts reading, “I love Guangzhou” — written in Cantonese — shouting “Protect Cantonese, Love Guangzhou” and singing popular Cantonese songs, the Global Times reported.
Su Zhijia, a deputy Chinese Communist Party secretary in Guangzhou, was quoted in the Global Times as saying there were no plans to dilute Cantonese, adding: “The city government has never had such a plan to abandon or weaken Cantonese.”
Guangzhou TV has responded by saying it would refuse to change its mix of Cantonese and Mandarin programming, the Yangcheng Evening News said last week.
However, many Cantonese speakers still worry about the future of a language that is the mother tongue for people in Hong Kong, Macau and Guangdong Province, and is widely spoken in overseas Chinese communities.
Beijing made Mandarin the country’s official language in 1982, leading to bans on other dialects at many radio and TV stations.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS