「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.」
#china #PRC #CCP #dictatorship #Chinese #mandarin #pekingese #putonghua #colonialism #imperialism #Tibetan #Uighur #Hongkong #Cantonese #conformity
@kerim
One minor thing that bothered me was that the otherwise very expansive piece on the #CCP #dictatorship didn't include even a single passing mention of #Tibetans, #Uighurs or #SouthMongolians facing #genocide in "Xi Jinping's China". I'd say those present a rather notable ethical dilemma for academic PRC engagers right there, but what do I know... 
(the only references to so-called ethnic minorities were: “70 cases of dissent by Tibetans and Mongolians.” and “ ...the anti-foreign protests surrounding reports on the uprising in Tibetan China in the Western press”)
In a way that is quite enlightening of the fact that sinologists are practically by definition preoccupied with the already-siniziced 'Han' Chinese subjects while their colonial victims aren't considered actually Chinese(!). Ordinarily the CCP would be foaming at the mouth at such 'distortion of historical facts', but, with irony sometimes self-immolating right on cue, the Party seems quite at peace with the lack of spotlight on its #lebensraum activities...
One might also add that the Chinese peoples (plural!) are facing their own potentially irreversible cultural genocide in the form of CCP's thirdreich-esque "One Language" drive (see: ein volk ein reich ein führer) where the party-neutered and ideogram-simplified version of Pekingese shall replace *all* of the native languages across the empire. Only a century ago all 'regions' in the empire had their own languages (naturally) and only those with special needs would acquire 'mandarin' from, well, some mandarin...
They are *not* dialects of some mythical 'chinese' any more than the variety of Indo-European languages would be mere dialects of some mythical 'european', or god forbid 'aryan' uber tongue.
#prc #china #chinese #pekingese #putonghua #sinology #oldchinahand #colonialism #imperialism