To truly protect Cantonese culture, Hongkongers should look to Guangdong

Campaigns like ‘I Am Hong Konger’ politicise Cantonese from the other side of the world when the way forward lies in mutual understanding and integration with Guangdong, the ancestral home of the language

Laurie Pearcey

Published: 6:45am, 13 Nov 2021

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“Dad, you can’t judge a place you’ve never been to,” said Lisa Simpson to her oafish father in television’s iconic dysfunctional nuclear family The Simpsons. “Yeah, that’s what people do in Russia,” added her rebellious brother Bart.

Seeing is indeed believing – and although quarantine requirements make a quick dash across the mainland border currently nigh-on impossible for most Hongkongers, I have been struck by the limited understanding of life on the mainland displayed by many since I moved to Hong Kong from Guangzhou.

Since I arrived, many locals have asked me if Cantonese is spoken in Guangzhou. The diplomat in me simply politely replied “of course they do”. The impatient soul who has struggled with basic daily tasks using only Mandarin in Guangzhou, such as buying vegetables from locals who only speak Cantonese, wanted to scream profanities and shout: “Of course they speak Cantonese in Canton!”.

Yet herein lies one source of the misperception. The word “Cantonese” is derived from the French word “canton” meaning corner or district and became known as the English word for Guangzhou when European powers sought to establish trading corners and districts in the city regarded as a gateway to the treasures of the Orient.

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Perhaps with Hong Kong’s history as a British colony, the English side of people’s brains overlook the language’s Chinese name, Guangdonghua or the “language of Guangdong”, and conveniently ignore the language’s real, natural and otherwise obvious connective tissue to the province.

But the misunderstanding of what occurs on the other side of the border is not just confined to chit-chat and small talk with a curious Mandarin-speaking foreigner – this issue has become a steroid to the politics which some people use as an arguably fraudulent basis to tear the city’s social fabric apart.

Media reports cite a desire to “protect” Hong Kong’s “unique” identity, including the use of the Cantonese language, as a major factor behind the work of overseas-based groups, such as Canada’s “I Am Hong Konger” campaign encouraging people with roots in the city to identify as a Hongkonger (rather than Chinese) in Canada’s census.

“We have a different language. We want to show that we exist,” declared an “I Am Hong Konger” campaign spokesman as he said this unique culture was “under threat and being erased”.

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So, is the answer to “protecting” this culture flying to the other side of the Pacific Ocean and setting up shop in Canada? Or is the answer beyond the northern border and seeing what is happening in Guangdong, the ancestral home of the Cantonese language?

Estimates vary but suggest that there are more than 75 million Cantonese speakers globally compared to more than 1.11 billion Mandarin speakers. You could argue that this is quite a substantial difference but if you consider Guangdong’s size relative to the rest of the country, and the history of global migration from the Greater Bay Area over the past two centuries, Cantonese makes more than a respectable showing.

I’d encourage the sceptics to spend half a day exploring Guangzhou’s Panyu district (the capital of the first Nanyue Kingdom some 2,000 years ago, and home to Cantonese cultural icons such as the Song dynasty village Shawan), visiting Shunde for a taste of lion dance, or experiencing Foshan, the ancestral home of Bruce Lee and Yip Man, the father of wing chun, for authentic Lingnan (Cantonese) culture.

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For those still sceptical, visit Guangzhou and try buying vegetables or ordering char siu off the street without speaking Cantonese.

I can hear you asking: “But why is Cantonese being killed on television screens?” The short answer is that it isn’t – just as Cantonese announcements are played on the metro in almost the same way they are in Hong Kong, so there are stand-alone television channels dedicated to broadcasting in the language.

TVB, Hong Kong cinema and other exports from this side of the border are widely consumed and appreciated by people across Guangdong province.

Mandarin is of course (and should be) widely spoken. It is the national language after all, an official United Nations language, and trails English as the second most widely spoken language globally.

In Guangdong, simplified characters are the norm (you might say “they have vandalised the essence of our written language”) but consider this – Beijing inherited a mass literacy crisis in 1949. About 20 per cent of the population was illiterate and, with an enormous rural population, literacy was key to advancing social mobility and the education agenda.

Fast forward to the 21st century and China reports an adult literacy rate of an astonishing 97.33 per cent.

Compare this performance to India’s and the difference is staggering – 74 per cent literacy in a country of 1.3 billion people where 65 per cent live in rural areas.

This is partially attributable to the diversity of writing systems and languages used across what is a large, complex melting pot of a federation. Hindi has simply failed to take off as the national language and the country’s literacy rate is arguably paying the price.

There is, of course, a role for a vibrant Cantonese culture – both in Hong Kong and across the border – but the answer to preserving, protecting and enhancing this gift bequeathed by our forebears who came from south of the Nanling Mountains is greater integration and mutual understanding, not fleeing to far distant shores under the pretence of preservation.

Laurie Pearcey is vice-president of external engagement & outreach at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a fluent Mandarin speaker and is learning Cantonese at the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre. The opinions here are his own