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.
US President Donald Trump yesterday announced sweeping "reciprocal tariffs" on US trading partners, including a 32 percent tax on goods from Taiwan that is set to take effect on Wednesday. At a Rose Garden event, Trump declared a 10 percent baseline tax on imports from all countries, with the White House saying it would take effect on Saturday. Countries with larger trade surpluses with the US would face higher duties beginning on Wednesday, including Taiwan (32 percent), China (34 percent), Japan (24 percent), South Korea (25 percent), Vietnam (46 percent) and Thailand (36 percent). Canada and Mexico, the two largest US trading
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
GRIDLOCK: The National Fire Agency’s Special Search and Rescue team is on standby to travel to the countries to help out with the rescue effort A powerful earthquake rocked Myanmar and neighboring Thailand yesterday, killing at least three people in Bangkok and burying dozens when a high-rise building under construction collapsed. Footage shared on social media from Myanmar’s second-largest city showed widespread destruction, raising fears that many were trapped under the rubble or killed. The magnitude 7.7 earthquake, with an epicenter near Mandalay in Myanmar, struck at midday and was followed by a strong magnitude 6.4 aftershock. The extent of death, injury and destruction — especially in Myanmar, which is embroiled in a civil war and where information is tightly controlled at the best of times —
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
RSS