南华早报专栏
The pro-Cantonese movement is a call for diversity in
a society that prizes national unity, writes Chang Ping
Cultural squeeze
Guangdong’s highly
developed people’s
culture is often at
odds with the official,
mainstream culture
The Guangzhou
government must have
felt aggrieved that a mere
proposal ignited such a
firestorm. Its suggestion
for the city’s two main
television channels to
change their language of
broadcast from
Cantonese to Putonghua
was immediately seen as an attempt to ban
the vernacular. Cantonese speakers rose in
defence of the language and, over several
weeks, several thousand of them took to
the streets to reject the plan.
Officials said they had been
misunderstood, and denied the proposal
was an attack on Cantonese. Even Wang
Yang , the province’s Communist
Party chief and its top leader, weighed in:
“Even I am learning Cantonese; who would
dare to do away with it?” But their repeated
assurances failed to pacify popular anger.
In the end, officials resorted to a well-worn
response: they mobilised scores of police to
break up the rallies, arrested a few of the
more active protesters and concluded that
the movement was the result of a scheming
few misleading the naive majority.
Governments that are confronted with
mass movements often trot out this
argument of the gullible masses, which is
an insult to the people. But, in this case,
officials may be genuinely puzzled: if the
people weren’t being manipulated, what
could account for the depth of their anger?
They should have asked: if the innocuous
proposal could not be the reason, what was
the real problem?
Cantonese is without doubt the best
preserved of the Han Chinese dialects
today, thanks to the residents of Hong
Kong and Macau, and ethnic Chinese all
over the world who still speak it. It draws
strength from a rich and thriving culture,
and is the leading language used in
Guangzhou’s TV and radio programmes �
an exceptional case on the mainland where
the use of dialects for broadcast on statecontrolled
media contravenes the official
policy of promoting Putonghua.
The official promotion of Putonghua in
fact began before the Communist Party
took power. Throughout history, the
standardisation of speech and writing is
used as an essential tool for cultural
development. In more modern times, the
rise of nationalism has further pushed
language into the centre of the cultural
debate. The late Qing government
renamed Mandarin Chinese the
“national language”. The succeeding
republican government widely
promoted it, while academics and
writers led a “national language”
campaign that influenced
generations. “National language”
was renamed Putonghua under
the communist government, which
built on the foundations already
laid to popularise the national
tongue.
But while language unification has
played an important role in nation
building, more people now understand
that their culture will be poorer for the
loss of its linguistic roots. Worldwide,
culturally and politically dominant
regions have seen their languages
become the national standard �
London English, Parisian French,
Tokyo Japanese and Beijing
Chinese � to the detriment of
other regional cultures.
The coexistence of
diverse cultures is a
postmodern concept.
With mainland ideology languishing at a
pre-modern stage, many people still have a
strong attraction to concepts that celebrate
unity and orthodoxy. To them, a country
with several official languages will bring
only chaos. And to those influenced by
social Darwinism, a few dialects falling by
the wayside is seen as the inevitable price
of progress.
In northern China, the ability to speak
Putonghua well is not only useful, but is
seen as a sign of good breeding. Speaking a
dialect, conversely, denotes backwardness
and is good only for comedy shows. In
Sichuan , TV programmes in dialect
have been pulled off the air on many
occasions, yet there were no movements to
defend the Sichuan dialect. People there
accept the logic of promoting Putonghua.
Not so those in Guangdong. In ancient
China, the south was ruled by barbarians
who did not share the ideals of a
centralised China; today, Guangdong
province is at the forefront of reform and
openness. Its highly developed people’s
culture is often at odds with the official,
mainstream culture propagated by the
north. This tussle was especially evident
when Guangdong’s economy took off in
the 1980s and 90s; national broadcasting
authorities banned Guangdong stations
from mimicking the styles of their Hong
Kong and Taiwanese counterparts in
repeated attempts to rein them in. Now as
Beijing gains in wealth and power, and
grass-roots groups become more strident,
we’ll continue to see the tug of war
between regional and national cultures.
The “official ban on Cantonese” may
have been a misperception, but the fear of
Guangdong residents for the survival of
their vernacular is real.
In the proposal submitted by members