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I m sorry but there is a Cantonese superiority complex, we see it here too in Hong Kong. It s not crazy, it s in a lot of other places (one american girl once told me Europe is boring, to which I replied for me all americans are morons: see a bit lol), but it s more than defensive and a big reason why we have so much trouble credibly communicating demands to Beijing.

> Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior

People who call themselves cantonese and not chinese are mostly from Hong Kong. People in Hong Kong always thought of themselves as superior to mainland Chinese and not just that they openly discriminated against them and darker skin people from south asia many of whom hold Hong Kong passport.

If you want to talk about regional differences like Newyorker or Californian then it does exist in China today where Shanghainese consider themselves at top and mostly disliked by Beijinger or HongKonger and others.

Efforts for unification of China started in Qin empire (221–206 BC) [0], which includes language standardisation and still a work in progress given there are still large number of dialects and ethnic groups in China. Lucky for China many of its historical culture remains along with language, cannot say the same for native Americans, whose language is not even part of official languages in North or South America.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_dynasty

Why do we have to bring Native Americans into it? This seems at best a non-sequitur, and at worst whataboutism to hide China's many issues with suppressing minority cultures. No one claims states in the Americas have a good history with this, why bring it up when it has nothing to do with the conversation? Both China and many other countries need to do better. Bringing up complaints about other countries does nothing but trying to distract.

I'm assuming you're chinese.

Can you explain to me why chinese people - not just in the PRC but also Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia - seem so eager to eliminate every chinese language that isn't Mandarin?

It's truly bizarre to me. Even people who want the EU to become a super state don't do things like call Dutch and French 'dialects' and demand the whole thing standardise to one language.

my understanding is that the written language is already standardized as Simplified Chinese, readable by almost all, but that Traditional Chinese written language exists, importantly in Taiwan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simp...

And also Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and various 'china town' enclaves in other western countries

It's not elimination. It's called "having a standard language so people can communicate". People still speak their non-Mandarin mother tongues at home and in general. Local dialects are still used at the bank, at government service centers, etc. It's just that you must _be able_ to communicate in Mandarin in case somebody from another province walks in. Some local schools, especially for minorities, still teach their mother tongue in school as a subject, on purpose - e.g. schools in Xinjiang.

History teaches us that is is exactly how an authoritarian state goes about eliminating local cultural identity and language.

ah come on guys, let's take a step back before making comments such as this one.

Or open one’s eyes to the cultural engineering that is occurring. Am I wrong?

If you look at any language that got wiped out, or nearly got wiped out, the story is always the same:

"they punished us at school if we spoke $MOTHER_TONGUE instead of $NATIONAL_LANGUAGE".

> ah come on guys, let's take a step back before making comments such as this one.

Care to explain what part of the comment you take issue with?

And they intentionally exclude it others. Kids in the 90s would get the stick if they spoke in Cantonese in school.

People still speak their non-Mandarin mother tongues at home and in general. Local dialects are still used at the bank, at government service centers, etc.

This isn't what actually happens in practice though. In practice, children speak the language their school tells them to speak. And generation by generation less and less people speak the other language, and in smaller and smaller areas.

I'm somewhat familiar with the situation in Taiwan. No one is actively suppressing Hokkien (or Taiwanese or whatever you want to call it) anymore, but the language of instruction is still Mandarin and so Hokkien is dying rapidly. Even in cases where both parents speak it, often their children can just understand it and don't speak it, and there's zero chance their children - grandchildren of hokkien speakers - will.

Used to work with some Chinese Malaysians from Penang. All under 30, all spoke Mandarin to each other because the level of Hokkien knowledge ranged from "fluent" to "none at all".

I don't know what you're talking about. My family-in-law is from Mainland China. My wife's sisters are married to different provinces. My nephews and nieces all pick up their non-Mandarin mother tongues.

I mean for Malaysia, schoolchildren of Chinese descent already have to pick up at least 3 standard languages Mandarin <- standard malaysian mandarin English <- duh Malay <- the official language of Malaysia On top of that, you add on the dialect, now there are practical considerations 1) Penang <- dominant dialect hokkien, and a penang kid who isn't even hokkien is going to need to figure out which dialect to use, hokkien, his native dialect or mandarain or english 2) KL <- cantonese in general, BUT certain places have certain stronger dialects etc etc etc

For practical reasons alone most people are going to focus on those top 3. I know some people who are reasonably fluent in no less than 5 languages but it's not that common and you will obviously see at least two or 3 are passable at best. These are going to happen even if the schools could somehow teach 4-5 dialects + standard mandarin +_ english + malay!

Right, but that's what I don't understand. Why introduce mandarin into the mix at all?

Malay: National Language

English: International langauge

Hokkien: Mother tongue

Mandarin: ???

I genuinely don't understand why a brand new language that wasn't traditionally spoken into the area was introduced.

For starters, hokkien is only a majority dialect in Penang... In KL its Cantonese or Hakka, for example. Much like (British) English, if there was going to be formal education in a Chinese dialect it was going to be Mandarin in line with what both the ROC and PRC did, since the whole point is to eventually enable everyone of Chinese ethnicity to communicate in a common tongue ( that isn't English...)

And in those days of the early 20th century when the foundations of formal education were laid if one was an educated person it would have been either in Mandarin or English (that said HK Cantonese is/was a huge pop culture influence but I don't think it ever was in an pan-sino educationist sense)

since the whole point is to eventually enable everyone of Chinese ethnicity to communicate in a common tongue ( that isn't English...)

Yeah, the strong desire to do that is something I don't understand. But thanks for getting to the crux of it - it's all about having a chinese exclusive lingua franca.

This really isn't that hard to understand, much the same way English was adopted as a lingua franca, Malaysia's Chinese population is itself heterogeneous and so at the national level the lingua franca of the Chinese nation, mandarin, is adopted over that of the disparate dialects that only had local superiority at city level.

A unified Chinese identity takes precedence over the local one, this is even more so when you are at the mercy of divide and conquer techniques. The only other alternative was Cantonese but then why would the Hokkien buy into that and vice versa? Educational resources are thin enough as it is.

I should probably also add that myself, a english speaking Malaysian Chinese would probably have to use english or malay with a random group of penang people since I can't speak mandarin - so from a purely practical point of view, given Malaysia and Singapore are a mishmash of southern dialects, we again come back to

English Mandarin Malay Then one of the various major dialects - and even then once you start moving around the country the Penang hokkien speaker in KL has to either switch to english or mandarin and the KL cantonese speaker in penang has to switch to mandarin and english and at the end of the day, with both the PRC and ROC using Mandarin as the common tongue, and the same situation existing for any other sinophere country bar Hong Kong...there we go.

If you go overseas and meet a random other Chinese person, your heuristics of common language are again going to skew

English or Mandarin then Cantonese then only one of the others so...

Now I don't know enough about 'dialects' in the sinosphere but I think that a dominant 'national' language is an expected outcome of globalisation. For example, French threatening to wipe out Occitan, Corsican and Breton, Castillian Spanish with Catalonian and other Iberian languages, Hindi and Urdu in India and Pakistan, etc. That's not to say that it's a good thing, just that it has happened in other places too. French policy on language might just be as strict from what I've read.

Many people in Latin America totally do this about every living native language which is not Spanish. I'd say the EU is the odd case rather than China here.

Not OP. For the Singapore case. The main reason is practicality. Mandarin and English considered more important in Global Business. English educated political leaders assumed learning Mandarin was hindered by speaking dialect at home. Singapore is a young nation then.

In Singapores case my more cynical take is they wanted to ensure that Chinese formed a linguistic majority, not just an ethnic one. China was an economic backwater when the Speak Mandarin policy came about, and Singapore already had and continues to have a real lingua franca - English.

Having a single language for Chinese diaspora functionally makes sense. Similarly (kind of), Bahasa Indonesia was created to help address the linguistic challenges of having an archipelago nation.

I've lived in Singapore for 10+ years. I work with a mix of Singaporeans (native and naturalized HK'r's) and Malay Chinese (coincidentally all from Penang). Day to day chats in the office is English/Singlish and hokkien. Calls with vendors in Penang are in English and Hokkien. Calls with Taiwanese vendors are in Mandarin. When we have calls with our Taiwanese vendors, one of my older Singaporean colleagues always attends because he has the strongest mandarin on the team.

As someone who has lived, worked, and has family in Guangdong/Guangzhou, a large number identify as Cantonese. I feel like your idea of what people think in these regions is just repeating the same stereotypes repeated in China, stating perception of feelings as fact.

Language standardization was for the written form, not spoken.

Yes within China people from Shanghai also call themselves Shanghainese and their dialect is also very different like Cantonese so its nothing special. Shanghainese consider themselves, like New Yorker more cultured than anyone else in China including Cantonese.

But people of Chinese ethnicity will first always identify themselves as Chinese not Cantonese or Shanghainese or Beijinger or Fujianese except for some people who prefer to think they are superior then being Chinese.

Its like saying New Yorker is different from a Californian and they are not American. When they are outside USA they will prefer to be called New Yorker not American.

> Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior, but they have generally felt pushed around by Beijing.

That's not even necessarily true, people all over China refer to themselves by their province, sometimes even prefecture or city, simply out of pride. People are proud of being from Shanghai, or proud of being from Fujian, etc. People are aware of tongue-in-cheek stereotypes regarding their own hometown among the larger Chinese population, and that makes each of them feel special and proud.

When it comes to suppression of the language, the exclusion of it in schools, the closing or attempted closing of radio and TV stations, and the hiring of outside officials to push Mandarin, they absolutely do. It wasn't long ago when you'd walk through districts like Liwan and see signs stating “no Mandarin” on restaurant signs or when vendors would refuse to speak to people in Mandarin. If you had lived in Guangzhou, especially in the 90s and 00s, you'd have experience this

Not really a new thing though, before (very roughly) 1900 most people in France did not speak French as we know it today, the French govt as a matter of policy forced everyone to speak the same language (and it's mostly worked).

Here in NZ the govt tried to force people not to speak Te Reo, literally beating it out of children in school, happily we're past that now but, well, that's how cultural imperialism works

Strangely enough, my family has been running a business in Dongguan (not Guangzhou, but close enough, still a major Cantonese industrial city of Guangdong province), since 1980s and we have seen nothing like that.

You can't say they "refuse" to speak to people in Mandarin because they simply _can't speak_ Mandarin. Back then, many people simply did not have enough schooling to learn Mandarin, and so they simply couldn't speak it (at least not fluently). The government was not stupid. There was utterly no reason to enforce Mandarin and deprecate Cantonese when they were expecting so much investment from Hong Kongers (who usually did not speak Mandarin either) during that period.

Cantonese TV stations and radio stations are still doing just fine today. And then of course you can't have just Cantonese when there's an influx of labour from other parts of China, which is why, as a simple matter of economic adaptation, Mandarin gradually picked up. But Cantonese is not being threatened in any way. In fact, there is now a more widespread understanding of the importance of Cantonese, because it is _closer_ to Middle Chinese from the Tang and Song dynasties than many other dialects. It's an important dialect for properly studying and appreciating Tang poems. I know people in more Northern parts of China who know Cantonese songs from the 80s and 90s of Hong Kong because they appreciate the more classical wordings and rhymes of the lyrics.

I find it quite amazing how much people love to bring up the tongue-in-cheek stereotypes. This is a perfectly normal interaction in China;

A) Hi, I'm from Sichuan B) Oh, great! It must be nice to sit around all day drinking tea.

In some ways, it sounds similar to the Catalonia - Madrid divide in Spain.

This is not a bad analogy considering Guangdong has historically been the seat of many internal conflicts.

Is the Taiping Civil War part of common Chinese awareness and discussion?

Curious how relatively recent regionalism plays in modern Chinese thought.

I can't answer your question (I left China at a very early age), but I think that it's a shame that the Taiping Civil War isn't widely known as things like the Russian civil war or even the Chinese civil war. People might have a different understanding of China if they knew anything about the Taiping or KMT-CCP wars. Hopefully others can answer your question.

> There's a lot of Chinese stereotypes being trotted out here, but I'll address this one.

As an ethnic Chinese who been in, and out of China every year since childhood, I'd yes, it's very superficial. I do not feel he lived in China for long enough outside of the insular expat bubble.

Chinese Americans have self-invented insecurities about being "identity-less," but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less"

This "identity searching" crowd looks very strange to me. Besides us speaking languages of the same linguistic family, is as easily different as India, and UK. For me, who spent nearly all childhood in Russia, and whose parents were separate from China for 5, and 4 generations, Chinese Americans do still feel more similarly wired than mainlanders today, which are their own completely brand new type of people.

It's very similar with my experience meeting overseas Russians from immigration waves from before 1917 in America. For some reason, to me they felt "more Russian" after 4-5 generations in the US than people whom I knew back home.

> 1. I visited a prison in Jiangxi to discuss a potential prisoner safety solution. In a meeting with the vice-warden, he tacitly mentioned how Adidas shoes were being made in the prison that he was running. We quickly pulled out of that project. I haven’t bought Adidas- or Nike-branded shoes since.

This gave me a chuckle. I don't know what to get off people like him. In China I've seen a lot of very strange Western types who scream "there is no Democracy in America!," and then ran to China out of all places to find a big surprise.

You sound like you have some interesting stories to tell too.

Please write them up!

> Chinese Americans have self-invented insecurities about being "identity-less," but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less"

Well said. I have my own ideas, but why do you think this is?

>but Chinese in China have very real insecurities about being "identity-less"

No idea what you mean by that.

I didn't read the entire article but the fact that he said he considers Macau separate speaks for itself to me, he probably doesn't know much about it. Hong Kong was truly separate until recently, Macau had been under Mainland control even before 1999 so it's been decades now. The influence is clearly visible to anyone who knows the country. There also weren't any meaningful protests when the CCP broke the two systems agreement as there were in Hong Kong.

That said, I don't see any reason to ad hominem attack the guy. China is a closed off society and increasingly so again under Xi. A foreigner will not understand everything after living there for a short time. Of course that's true for any place but it's especially true with China. It's a running joke among expats that new arrivals who've only been there a year or two have the complete opposite view of the country than they're going to have a couple of more years down the line.

Adidas have a highly automated shoe factory outside Guangzhou which is amongst the best in the world. I think it's safe to say they are moving from manual labor toward automation. Perhaps pressure from bad media like this will accelerate that process.