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.
AGING: As of last month, people aged 65 or older accounted for 20.06 percent of the total population and the number of couples who got married fell by 18,685 from 2024 Taiwan has surpassed South Korea as the country least willing to have children, with an annual crude birthrate of 4.62 per 1,000 people, Ministry of the Interior data showed yesterday. The nation was previously ranked the second-lowest country in terms of total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime. However, South Korea’s fertility rate began to recover from 2023, with total fertility rate rising from 0.72 and estimated to reach 0.82 to 0.85 by last year, and the crude birthrate projected at 6.7 per 1,000 people. Japan’s crude birthrate was projected to fall below six,
Conflict with Taiwan could leave China with “massive economic disruption, catastrophic military losses, significant social unrest, and devastating sanctions,” a US think tank said in a report released on Monday. The German Marshall Fund released a report titled If China Attacks Taiwan: The Consequences for China of “Minor Conflict” and “Major War” Scenarios. The report details the “massive” economic, military, social and international costs to China in the event of a minor conflict or major war with Taiwan, estimating that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could sustain losses of more than half of its active-duty ground forces, including 100,000 troops. Understanding Chinese
US President Donald Trump in an interview with the New York Times published on Thursday said that “it’s up to” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) what China does on Taiwan, but that he would be “very unhappy” with a change in the “status quo.” “He [Xi] considers it to be a part of China, and that’s up to him what he’s going to be doing, but I’ve expressed to him that I would be very unhappy if he did that, and I don’t think he’ll do that. I hope he doesn’t do that,” Trump said. Trump made the comments in the context
SELF-DEFENSE: Tokyo has accelerated its spending goal and its defense minister said the nation needs to discuss whether it should develop nuclear-powered submarines China is ramping up objections to what it sees as Japan’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, despite Tokyo’s longstanding renunciation of such arms, deepening another fissure in the two neighbors’ increasingly tense ties. In what appears to be a concerted effort, China’s foreign and defense ministries issued statements on Thursday condemning alleged remilitarism efforts by Tokyo. The remarks came as two of the country’s top think tanks jointly issued a 29-page report framing actions by “right-wing forces” in Japan as posing a “serious threat” to world peace. While that report did not define “right-wing forces,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs was
RSS