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