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.
STAY CAUTIOUS: Rain is expected to begin easing this afternoon, but a CWA forecaster said that if the storm stalls or loops on its approach, heavy winds are likely Typhoon Champi, which caused widespread damage and injuries, and prompted road closures and evacuations across Taiwan yesterday, is expected to continue to bring heavy rain this morning, with up to 900mm of rain forecast for mountainous areas of New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Yilan County, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. At one point a super typhoon and one of the strongest storms in the Pacific this year, Champi was packing gusts of about 191kph near its center as of 8:30pm, the CWA said. Taipei, New Taipei City, Keelung, Taoyuan, Hsinchu city and county, Taichung; and Yilan, Miaoli, Changhua, Nantou, Yunlin
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) yesterday urged China not to exploit typhoons to assert jurisdiction over the Taiwan Strait. The CGA issued the remarks after it found that China was shadowing eight Japan Coast Guard ships that sheltered in Taiwan proper’s western waters due to Typhoon Champi. Eight Japan Coast Guard (JCG) vessels sailed southward along the Taiwan Strait median line from 6am on Thursday, reaching waters southwest of Penghu County’s Cimei Island (七美島), outside Taiwan’s contiguous zone, which extends 24 nautical miles (44.4km) from the territorial sea baseline, it said. As the Japanese ships prepared for the typhoon, they were followed by
Taiwanese gymnast Tang Chia-hung (唐嘉鴻) on Sunday won gold in the men’s horizontal bar final at the Artistic Gymnastics World Championships in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Tang scored 14.966 in the final. He had advanced to the final in second place with a score of 14.566 points in qualifying, with a difficulty score of 6.000 and an execution score of 8.566. In the final, he raised his difficulty score to 6.600, the highest among the eight finalists. Although he did not fully steady himself on landing, his score was still enough to claim the gold medal. Taiwan had previously won two silver medals and
TOTAL COVERAGE: Champi’s outer band is expected to blanket the entire nation, with the center coming closest tonight or tomorrow before leaving tomorrow evening School and work across most of the nation has been canceled today, as Typhoon Champi is expected to skirt the northeast edge of Taiwan proper. As of 9pm, all municipalities except for Kinmen County had announced cancelations. Taitung County last night announced closures on Green Island (綠島) and Orchid Island (Lanyu, 蘭嶼), but did not announce for the rest of the county until 6am today. Stock market settlements scheduled for today would be postponed to the next business day, the Taiwan Stock Exchange said. The announcements came after the Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday expanded its land warning for Champi to 19 regions
RSS