Hong Kong Soft Power and Cantonese Regionalism

Language unites a civilization. Only with efficient communication can
a group of people bond so much as to consider themselves to belong to
one society and one culture. A common language creates common
languages and diminishes the separating effects of geographic and
transportation barriers. Nowhere is such a principle more aptly
illustrated than here in China, where 20% of humanity have become one
nation through the use of Mandarin Chinese as a prevailing lingua
franca.

Sure, unintelligible local dialects still exists, but as internal
migration pick up pace (and it certainly has with hundreds of millions
of migrant labor moving into large cities), the power of local tongues
has considerably weakened as people from all areas of China begin to
live next to each other in expanding cities. People no longer use
their local tongues because the majority of the people they come
across everyday cannot understand them even if the tongues are used in
the original localities.

Politics have also helped. The deliberate construction of all
dialects except Mandarin as "backward" while portraying Mandarin as
the only "civilized" language, coupled with political moves that allow
for much easier internal migrations, have further weakened the hold of
local dialects, causing many to disappear from everyday use, or become
so toned down so as to share the vocabulary and pronunciation of
Mandarin.

So the local tongues gradually evolve into mutually intelligible
accented versions of standard Mandarin, benign enough to be simply
considered exotic without hampering communication. Yet, one dialect,
mutually unintelligible with Mandarin, has bulked such trend and
showed contemptible pride in its exceptionalism. And that dialect, is
of course, Cantonese. In Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Macau, I have been
hit with the consciousness that Cantonese is not anywhere close to
dying as other local dialects are.

Most people speak Cantonese on the street, subway announcements are in
both Mandarin and Cantonese, and there are even TV stations devoted to
Cantonese programming. In comparison, Shanghainese (perhaps the
second most influential local dialect here in China) have lost all the
glamor of yesteryear as Shanghai becomes a congregation point for
people from all over China. It is no longer spoken on the street, and
rarely do you hear Shanghainese even on local TV and radio stations.

Sure, politics have helped Cantonese's survival. Hong Kong and Macau,
as a separate jurisdiction under European and now Special
Administrative rule, restricts immigration from other parts of China,
allowing the creation of a homogeneous society made up almost entirely
of Cantonese-speakers that cannot be found anywhere else in China
(Guangzhou, as the largest Cantonese-speaking city, took up a lot of
immigrants, but still maintain a Cantonese flavor due to large native
population base)

And Hong Kong's soft power has made Cantonese even more special. Even
today, Hong Kong tends to be considered one of the hubs for pop
culture in the Chinese speaking world, and its cultural products
(mainly in Cantonese but increasing in Mandarin to attract more
consumers in Taiwan and the mainland) are watched all over China and
beyond. Because of Hong Kong's soft power, Cantonese has long been
the language of "cool" (much in the same way Japanese and Korean also
are today), causing government effort to suppress it as "backward"
largely ineffective.

Even though no one would expect Cantonese to take over the status of
lingua franca from Mandarin, a proudly regionalistic Cantonese still
poses serious threat to national and cultural unity of China as a
whole. The problem is not so much the appeal of Cantonese but the
determination of other local dialects to achieve the same exceptional
status of being condoned as a publicly used language just as Cantonese
have.

In other words, the continued powerful presence of Cantonese is a
strong catalyst for revivalist movement of other local dialects, most
notably Shanghainese here in Shanghai and the greater use of Taiwanese
over in Taiwan. The goal of such revivalist movements is no less to
create exclusive local societies that resists immigration and contact
with other parts of Chinese civilization, thereby creating a local
independent identity amid heightened sense of local cultural
superiority.

For a pan-Sinicist like me, such movements are to be highly feared.
Without cultural homogeneity facilitated by linguistic unity, a
civilization as large as ethnically, geographically, and economically
diverse as China is bound to fall apart, leaving it once again
vulnerable to foreign influences just as we have seen for the past
century and a half and continues to see today in the cultures of
Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Cantonese exceptionalism must be
stopped before its too late.