This is the best summary I could come up with:
A Cantonese language advocacy group in Hong Kong stopped operations after local officials raided the family house of its chairman last week over an essay published three years ago.
It’s the latest sign of waning freedoms in Hong Kong, since a sweeping national security law was passed in 2020 that has since been used to curtail civil liberties in the city and stamp out anything perceived as a critique of or threat to Beijing’s expanding influence in the former British colony-turned-Chinese enclave.
Andrew Lok Han Chan, the chair and founder of Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis (SLHK)—which formed in 2013 and has advocated for the preservation of Cantonese or Guangdonghua, a language with origins in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong (formerly called Canton) and also widely used in Hong Kong and Macau—announced on Facebook on Monday that he was disbanding the group “effective immediately,” to “ensure the safety of my family and former members.”
Under Xi Jinping’s rule, as China has increasingly repressed Hong Kong’s freedoms and identity, Tsang says, Hongkongers have viewed identifying with Cantonese as a means to push back.
The SLHK’s shutdown falls in line with Xi’s other measures to increase the city’s swift integration with China, Tsang adds: “Dissent that can be seen as posing any kind of challenge to the CCP’s authority is no longer permitted in Hong Kong."
In 2016, the dystopian film “Ten Years”—which depicted a Hong Kong that has Mandarin as the dominant language—was reportedly banned from Chinese public screenings at Beijing’s behest.
The original article contains 886 words, the summary contains 250 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
LOL, imagine writing that subheading unironically.
Radio Free Asia reported
That’s one point out of dozens in the article with links to China doing the same shit to other people.
But because a single link leads to a CIA adjacent news source, then the entire article must be thrown out…
Tankies, so obsessed with seeing the US as the bad guy that they actively ignore when China or Russia also fuck up the world and abuse their citizens.
Can´t control the population if they have their own language.
How insecure do you have to be that you find it necessary to suppress a language?
You owe it to yourself to read the article and realise that there is literally nothing in the claim. The headline is bollocks.
Chaak-ming Lau, an assistant professor of linguistics at the Education University of Hong Kong, believes that despite increased use of Mandarin in Hong Kong society, the city is not at risk of losing Cantonese. In Hong Kong’s 2021 census, over 6.3 million people aged 5 and up still have Cantonese as their usual spoken language. The Hong Kong government’s official stance is promoting biliteracy in English and written Chinese, and trilingualism in English, Putonghua, and Cantonese. And in the Ethnologue, the world’s most comprehensive catalog of languages, Cantonese—as part of the Yue Chinese family—has “institutional vitality,” which means communities and institutions use it extensively. “Cantonese is very far from being endangered,” Lau tells TIME.
6.3 million out of 7 million people still use it as their main language. I can see how calling for the “preservation of Cantonese” could be viewed as a separatist dogwhistle. The essay that caught the attention of the government was one that described the future of Hong Kong as one where Cantonese and local culture is all but wiped out by the mainland government in 20 years. One character in the story calls the protagonist who grew up in England “more qualified to be a Hong Konger than any of us” because they were saved from the see see pee mind virus. It’s very funny.
It’s worth noting as well that there are shit loads of languages spoken across China and that Mandarin is essentially the Esperanto of China, allowing communication across the country.
This really is just sensationalist rubbish.
