Just as a side note the American industrial revolution was built on intellectual property theft [1]. So was the Byzantine empire [2]. The British empire (and it’s tea production) also did well out of IP theft [3].
[1] https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smuggling_of_silkworm_eggs_i...
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.
Language standardization was for the written form, not spoken.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simp...
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".
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!
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.
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.
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
A) Hi, I'm from Sichuan B) Oh, great! It must be nice to sit around all day drinking tea.
Curious how relatively recent regionalism plays in modern Chinese thought.
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.
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.
Please write them up!
Well said. I have my own ideas, but why do you think this is?
There's a lot of Chinese stereotypes being trotted out here, but I'll address this one. Those who refer to themselves as Cantonese do not feel superior, but they have generally felt pushed around by Beijing. Guangdong was, and still partially is, the economic powerhouse of China. This has made the North nervous at times. Beijing has continually pushed their political weight around to try and stifle any sense of original Cantonese cultural, from suppressing the language and media to installing leaders that are happy to oblige with these policies. For the most part they have been successful, and it's quite sad. The homogenization of China is seen as necessary to bind the country, but has destroyed the cultural beauty of the country.