China’s Language Police

Why Beijing Seeks to Extend the Hegemony of Mandarin

By Gina Anne Tam
September 19, 2023

Practicing calligraphy in Jiujiang, China, February 2020

Thomas Peter / Reuters
In late August, authorities in Hong Kong raided the home of Andrew Chan, the
founder of a Cantonese-language advocacy group called the Hong Kong Language
Learning Association. National security police questioned Chan about an essay
contest the group hosted three years earlier for literature composed in Cantonese,
the lingua franca of Hong Kong. One of the finalists in the contest was a fictional
futuristic short story about a young man seeking to recover histories of Hong Kong
lost to authoritarian erasure. During a warrantless search of his home, they
demanded that Chan remove the work from his website, threatening severe
consequences for him and his family. Afterward, Chan put out a statement that he
had no choice but to dissolve his group entirely, an organization that had worked to
promote Hong Kong’s culture through the preservation of the Cantonese language
for nearly ten years.
The Chinese state has long been interested in suppressing the diversity of
languages spoken in the mainland and, more recently, its special administrative
regions. Through state policy, it elevates Mandarin as the sole national language
and devalues all other languages, from those spoken by China’s minority
ethnicities, such as Tibetan and Uyghur, to other local Chinese languages, the most
well-known one being Cantonese. As I observed in Foreign Affairs in 2016, the
state language policies that produce this hierarchy are undergirded by the
philosophy that Chinese identity, including the language that represents it, should
be unified, homogenous, and intrinsically tied to the Chinese state. Such a
philosophy sees expressions of Chinese identity that are different or diverse—
including the celebration or equal treatment of any language besides the Chinese
national language—as unimportant at best, and threatening at worst. In recent
years, however, the Chinese state has taken an even more uncompromising line. Its
policies of the mid-2010s seem mild by comparison to its attempts today to flatten
the complexity of Chinese identity and extend the untrammeled hegemony of
Mandarin.
OUT OF MANY, ONE
It is common to think of China as a linguistically homogenous country whose
citizens speak a sole “Chinese” language, Mandarin. But China is an extremely
linguistically diverse country. Beyond the dozens of languages spoken by China’s
indigenous minority groups, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan, the country
is also home to dozens of Chinese languages such as Cantonese, Shanghainese, and
Sichuanese. Today, the state calls these Chinese languages fangyan, a term that is
almost universally translated as “dialect.” In official rhetoric, state policies, and
even the constitution of the People’s Republic of China, the state deems Mandarin
its sole national language and the “common language of the Han people.” The
hierarchy embedded in these policies serves the interests of the current Chinese
state, but it predates the founding of the PRC. Since the Republican period (1911–
49), various Chinese states have promoted Mandarin—a standardized language
based on the language of Beijing and its surrounding region—as the sole national
idiom, and state and nonstate actors have sought to reframe other Chinese
languages as nothing more than dialects. And at the level of policy, the Nationalist
government, like its Communist successor, promoted a singular Chinese language
with policies that were similar to those the PRC would subsequently implement.
Under the Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the government has taken a further interest in
promulgating a common tongue. A 2012 directive empowered state actors to
promote Mandarin through the “supervision and inspection” of the language used
in both public and private spaces. From yearly “promote Mandarin week” events in
local schools, where schoolchildren happily declare “Speak Mandarin, build the
China dream together,” to provincial governments banning the use of local
languages in administrative offices, to senior party leaders admonishing cadres
whose Mandarin is “deficient,” government actors at all levels have taken this
directive to heart in big and small ways. Eleven years later, the effects of this
policy are increasingly obvious. Surveys across China increasingly show that the
number of people who can speak local languages other than Mandarin is dwindling
quickly.
For languages spoken by people who are not Han, China’s ethnic majority, the
situation is even more dire. In Xinjiang, Uyghurs are habitually detained or
punished for speaking their native language, while the propaganda forced on
detainees in “reeducation” camps includes education in the Mandarin language. In
Tibet, the state has made it harder for people to learn the local language, even
arresting a Tibetan language activist in 2016 for asking the state to honor its
constitutional commitment to treat all ethnic languages equally. In 2020, protests in
Inner Mongolia against cuts to Mongolian language instruction in schools were
met with harsh crackdowns and arrests.
Such crackdowns have been generally less harsh for advocates of languages such
as Cantonese—a non-Mandarin tongue spoken by China’s ethnic majority—but
these languages, too, endure state suppression. The case of the Hong Kong
Language Learning Association is the most recent and public, but it comes on the
heels of years of heightened rhetoric from both the Chinese central government
and its allies in Hong Kong that downplays non-Mandarin Chinese languages as
“nothing more than dialects” that do not deserve the kind of status and clout
afforded to the Chinese national language.
SILENT TONGUES
These crackdowns are, on their own, a portent of the ways in which the Chinese
state seeks to extend the hegemony of Mandarin. Yet they represent only a small
part of how the state has sought to force China’s languages into a clear hierarchy.
For every quashed demonstration or shuttered advocacy group, there are hundreds
of decisions being made in Beijing that create new hurdles for learning, speaking,
or creating in languages besides Mandarin.
One of the areas in which these hurdles are most obvious is in infrastructural and
educational priorities. Today, in mainland China, all romanization of Chinese
characters used on street signs, in books, and in public squares are required to be in
Hanyu Pinyin, a romanization system based on Mandarin pronunciation; Chinese
children are required to learn it in schools, while romanization systems for other
pronunciations, which exist only for a tiny percentage of other character-based
Chinese languages, are not. Hanyu Pinyin is regularly taught even in Hong Kong
schools, while Cantonese romanization systems are rarely taught, promoted, or
used. Even censorship apparatuses reflect the state’s linguistic priorities. In 2019, a
popular video-based social media app called Douyin (the Chinese version of
TikTok) began sending warning messages to users who posted videos in Cantonese
to “Please Use Mandarin.” When pressed about the messages, Douyin’s owner,
Bytedance, responded that its aim was not to ban the use of Cantonese; it simply
lacked the infrastructure to moderate content in Cantonese. The company that had
grown in popularity seemingly overnight saw no value in hiring enough Cantonese
speakers to ensure that Cantonese posts properly adhered to China’s censorship
regulations.
Ultimately, people who want to speak in or create in their mother tongues can find
workarounds to these problems. Speakers of Cantonese or other non-Mandarin
languages can use platforms besides Douyin, at least for now. Although Cantonese
speakers may learn Pinyin, they can choose, if they wish, to learn Cantonese
romanization through other channels or ignore romanization systems altogether.
But the state is choosing to invest in some linguistic infrastructures, such as
censors fluent in Mandarin, Mandarin romanization systems, or Mandarin
education, and not invest in others. Such decisions are often just as insidious as
outright bans, as they ensure that fewer people have the means or will to continue
to speak languages that do not benefit from state support or public infrastructure.
This kind of passive divestment also comes with the veil of plausible deniability.
The state can more easily deny that the neglect of non-Mandarin languages
amounts to active oppression.
VOICING IDENTITY
Through its rhetoric, policies, and enforcement priorities, the government in
Beijing has made it abundantly clear that it is intent on stifling not only dissent but
also alternative ways of expressing Chinese identity. Indeed, when it comes to
Hong Kong, Beijing’s government and its allies in the former British colony see
attempts to express a unique sense of identity as tantamount to dissent. From
repeatedly looking for legal avenues to ban the Cantonese-language protest anthem
“Glory to Hong Kong” to consistently adjusting social studies and history curricula
to impress upon schoolchildren that they are not “Hong Kongers” but Chinese
citizens who live in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong government and the authorities in
Beijing seek to ensure that the vision of a homogenous Chinese identity extends to
Hong Kongers.
In recent years, Beijing has acquired better means to enforce its goals.
Technological advances have granted the Chinese state new ways to surveil and
control private spaces. The intimacy with which the government can today shape
everyday life in China has further curtailed what freedom people have to express
themselves. The widespread use of surveillance, extrajudicial detention, and forced
labor in Xinjiang in recent years represents the lengths to which the government
will go to extract compliance from the country’s residents. But many of these
strategies are quickly becoming widespread throughout the country, in particular
since the “zero COVID” measures that began in 2020 normalized active
surveillance in everyday life. Although many of these measures are not yet
common in Hong Kong, surveillance there, too, has increased, both in how Hong
Kong police track an individual’s movements and speech, and in the range of
actions they deem threats to national security.

At a pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong, December 2019

Danish Siddiqui / Reuters
That does not mean that people in China and Hong Kong are quietly accepting the
stiffening of authoritarian rule. Dissent in the mainland, while sometimes furtive
and tenuous, can still be seen throughout the country, from efforts by local
Shanghainese to resist Mandarin hegemony by promoting their local language
through literature contests to the "white paper" protests against the zero-COVID
lockdowns. But resistance to Beijing’s increasing authoritarian rule is most
palpable in Hong Kong. The 2019 protests brought the unique identity of Hong
Kong to the forefront, as more and more Hong Kongers refused to identify with
their overarching national identity, with polls at the time finding that fewer than
one in ten Hong Kong residents identified as exclusively Chinese, and almost half
identified only as “Hong Konger.” This shift is even more noticeable among young
people, as a June 2022 poll found that 76 percent of people aged 18 to 30 identified
as Hong Kongers, with only two percent describing themselves as Chinese.
Language has been a core vector through which Hong Kongers have resisted state
attempts to reshape the identity of their city. Indeed, as journalists such as Mary
Hui have noted, Cantonese became a core language of protest in the 2019
movement, a way for Hong Kongers to assert their identity as separate from that of
the PRC and create a shared set of symbols, phrases, and songs that bonded
Cantonese speakers together in the context of opposition to the PRC state. In the
wake of the 2020 national security law, a sweeping law that nominally targets acts
of secession and subversion but is being used liberally to squash dissent and
protest, efforts to protect Hong Kong identity through the preservation of its
language have extended around the world, with Cantonese-speaking groups
in North America and Europe working to promote the language within the
diaspora.
The effect of the closure of the Hong Kong Language Learning Association is
clear: Cantonese, and non-Mandarin languages in China writ large, have lost a
strong advocate, and others who seek to promote language rights will become wary
of doing so. And the effects of this chilling of speech are wide-reaching. Language
is an integral part of who people are. When a powerful institution narrows where
and how they can use it, as the Chinese state has been doing in the past decade, it
stifles their ability to express themselves in complex, deeply human ways.