At the recent meeting of Guangzhou’s legislature, the city’s mayor laid out the government’s plans for the coming 15th Five Year Plan period, pledging to “protect Cantonese.” Sun Zhiyang said that this would help to create “an important link for overseas Chinese around the world to strengthen their Chinese cultural identity.”
The announcement is symbolically significant – Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong province, home to most speakers of the Yue branch of the Chinese language. Cantonese, which takes its name from the city, is the most widely spoken of Yue dialects.
Local media reports described this as the first time that the city has pledged to protect the language. Whether or not this is actually a first for Guangzhou, the announcement sits uneasily with the country’s broader language policy, which will likely put the brakes on the effectiveness of any protection.
Both the Chinese Constitution and various laws state that ethnic minorities have the right to speak and promote their language. Even these minority rights have come under pressure in recent years as the authorities have taken an increasingly assimilationist turn. Notably, no such standing is given to regional varieties of Chinese.
While the central government has promoted standard Mandarin as the national language since the early years of the People’s Republic, its efforts have grown in scope and effect in recent decades. Mandarin now dominates education, official communication, and public life.
Beyond government policy, China’s rapid economic growth and urbanization means people are more likely than ever to move away from where they grew up and spend their lives using the national lingua franca. Also, many parents see speaking Mandarin as key to their children’s social mobility. A 2017 poll of parents in Jiangxi’s provincial capital found that 70 percent didn’t speak the local dialect with their children. There are countless stories of children around the country being unable to communicate with their dialect-speaking grandparents.
This has left many people anxious that their local identities and cultures may be fading away.
Ironically, Cantonese is perhaps the least threatened of all non-Mandarin dialects. It’s likely the most widely spoken, both by tens of millions of people in Southern China and millions more overseas. The province’s television and radio stations continue to broadcast at least some programs in Cantonese, alongside Cantopop. Hong Kong churns out dozens of Cantonese movies each year. No other non-Mandarin dialect enjoys a comparable quantity of media production.
Delegates to the meeting of Guangzhou’s legislature had some suggestions on how Cantonese could be protected. While most of these focused on promoting traditional Cantonese opera, the president of a peanut-growing cooperative went further. A local newspaper reported that Wu Xiaoli called for the government to implement Cantonese classes in schools, collect and organize Cantonese materials, develop learning apps, and use new media such as short videos and livestreams to expand the influence of Cantonese culture.
If carried out, these measures would go beyond other regions’ often tokenistic efforts at dialect preservation, which can amount to one-off events or standalone classes. However, it’s unclear what specific policies the Guangzhou government has in mind.
It may depend on how the authorities interpret China’s Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language, the main statute governing the use and promotion of Mandarin. In December, the law was revised for the first time in 25 years. Among the changes was an updated list of scenarios in which Mandarin is mandated – adding online content such as dramas, movies and video games. This could make it harder to expand the influence of Cantonese culture online in the ways Wu advocated.
On the other hand, the revised law retains an article describing circumstances in which dialects can be used, including for teaching “when necessary.” Presumably, it would be hard to argue that using Cantonese isn’t necessary for teaching Cantonese.
