China Begins Stamping Out Cantonese in Hong Kong

China’s state-run Global Times on Monday reported on efforts to eliminate the Cantonese language from Hong Kong, replacing it with the Mandarin language preferred by the Chinese Communist Party.

Hong Kong education secretary Christine Choi Yuk-lin argued that Hong Kong youth require fluency in Mandarin — which the Chinese government has rechristened as Putonghua or “the common language” — in order to be successful in Chinese business and society.

Choi said this would prove particularly true in the “Greater Bay Area,” the coastal region encompassing Hong Kong, Macau, and Chinese industrial hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen. The Chinese government is striving to make Hong Kong feel more like another Chinese city in the Greater Bay Area and less like a special semi-autonomous island.

“In the future, if teachers meet requirements and schools offer the environment for learning language, as well as students are capable of understanding it, using Putonghua in local education will be a more convenient way,” Choi said.

Cantonese, and Hong Kong’s distinctive version of it, has long been the dominant language spoken in the city. English was the second-most-popular language until recently, followed by Mandarin.

Hong Kong’s very name is an Anglicized take on the Cantonese term heung gong, which means “fragrant harbor” — a moniker earned by the importance of the incense trade to the port city.

After the British handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, more Chinese began moving to the city, causing Mandarin (or “Putonghua”) to increase in popularity. The number of Hong Kong residents who listed Mandarin as their first language doubled in roughly 20 years, accompanied by a greater emphasis on learning the language in schools.

Some Hongkongers were critical of the big push to switch to Mandarin, which included efforts by the Beijing-controlled island government to marginalize, or even outright demonize, the Cantonese language and its cultural significance. 

The Chinese government and its supporters in Hong Kong denigrated Cantonese as a quaint relic of British rule, preserved in amber simply because it was the prevailing regional dialect at the time the United Kingdom controlled the island. 

“They say if you want to kill a city, you kill its language,” outspoken pro-democracy lawmaker Claudia Mo remarked in 2019.

Hong Kong residents clung to Cantonese even as more of them decided to learn Mandarin, too. Some evidently felt it was simply a practical necessity to learn the language spoken throughout much of the vast empire that has taken increasingly tight-fisted control over Hong Kong. Some resented the cultural imperialism of Beijing’s efforts to erase Hong Kong’s unique culture and history.

With chilling nonchalance, the Global Times remarked that Hong Kong’s education sector is under tighter control by Beijing thanks to the tyrannical “national security law” imposed in 2020 to crush the pro-democracy movement, and a top “reform” goal is to eliminate dissent from Communist authority among students.

“The social turmoil in 2019 underscored the necessity of enhancing the national security awareness among Hong Kong youth and of correcting some misconceptions and misunderstandings about the country, the ‘one country, two systems’ and some other important ideas,” the Global Times wrote, suggesting that process of suppression will be made easier by forcing students to speak the Communist Party tongue and think of themselves as nothing more than communist subjects.

A specific example cited during the interview with Choi was a new “citizenship” curriculum that insists “Hong Kong has never been a colony of Britain,” a bit of ahistorical propaganda intended to burn the “right understanding of the region” into the brains of students and correct “long-held flawed thinking in the city’s educational system.” 

Choi noted the “citizenship” curriculum obliges Hong Kong students to take more field trips to Chinese cities in the Greater Bay Area, an activity that would heavily pressure them to learn Mandarin.