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.
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