Chinese regions fight back against surge of Mandarin

2010. november 22./Reuters/ITN/TibetPress

GUANGZHOU, China/SHANGHAI, China (Reuters) - From the remote mountains of Tibet to the soaring skyscrapers of Shanghai and Guangzhou, an unlikely issue has emerged to both anger and unite China's disparate peoples - their language.

The country's 1.3 billion people may be almost all exclusively educated in one tongue, the official medium of Mandarin, but decades of its promotion has failed to stifle popular attachment to regional vernaculars and dialects.

The banishing or planned banishment from the airwaves and classrooms of languages such as Cantonese, Shanghainese and Tibetan has sparked rare public protests, as people push back against a government with little time for cultural diversity.

At a rally in the booming southern city of Guangzhou in late July, protesters thronged against police and shouted obscenities, demanding the protection of their mother tongue, Cantonese.

"The protesters were very united. We all had just one aim: to protect our own language," said Michelle, one of the self-proclaimed "cultural defenders" at the rally who asked her full name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Protests against cornerstones of government policy are rare

in a country where the ruling Communist Party values stability above all and comes down hard on dissent.

"Cantonese people speak Cantonese!" many yelled, in a surprisingly venomous retort to authorities, and a passionate defense of culture that caught officials - more accustomed to simmering unrest over issues like land grabs, corruption and pollution - off guard.

A subsequent protest, organized via an online campaign and buzzing chatrooms was soon smothered by police and Internet censors in a sign of unease by the Party at any challenge to its rule.

Still, the government did back down slightly, promising that Cantonese broadcasting would continue in Guangzhou, making it one of the few places in China where state-run radio and television make wide use of the vernacular.

Only about half of China's 1.3 billion people speak Mandarin, according to government surveys. Visit the vast and poor countryside and the chances of hearing pure Mandarin spoken as an everyday language are practically nil.

Throughout China's long and turbulent history, the nation's emperors and rulers have been driven by a desire to unite the country and to standardize speech as a powerful policy lever.

Diversity hasn't been a priority for Beijing when seen in this context, and critics sometimes say Beijing's pro-Mandarin policies can amount to cultural intimidation.

In October, ethnic Tibetan students took to the streets in the western province of Qinghai to protest against what they view as the marginalization of Tibetan in the education system in favor of Mandarin.
By James Pomfret and Farah Master