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 al