A Hong Kong lawyer says it’s likely that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will ban the Cantonese language in the near future, given one education official’s negative comments about the language and Beijing’s efforts to stamp out native tongues in other regions.
“An official of the Education Bureau of Hong Kong said speaking Cantonese—that is our mother tongue—is evil,” said Luk, who rose to fame for helping pro-democracy protesters on the front lines of the 2019 demonstrations in Hong Kong with prompt legal assistance.
“So I assume that they will ban Cantonese in the forthcoming future.”
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Luk said the official she referred to was Christine Choi Yuk Lin, incumbent secretary for education of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, who took the helm on July 1.
‘Vilified Cantonese-Speaking Children as Devils’
In an interview with Voice of America in June, Chan Lok-hang, convener of Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis, a group advocating for Cantonese to be Hong Kong’s language of instruction, alleged that Choi was the “the main promoter of teaching Chinese in Mandarin, that is, the helmsman of the so-called ‘general education.’”“She had held lectures to ask all schools in Hong Kong to create a context and establish a mechanism to promote ‘general education’ in schools. For example, the content of an educational television series [that] vilified Cantonese-speaking children as devils,” Chan alleged, according to the article.
The Greater Bay Area is a coastal region comprising Hong Kong, Macau, and nine cities in southeastern China’s Guangdong Province, which includes industrial hubs like Guangzhou (or Kwangchow) and Shenzhen.
Is to ‘Replace Our Culture’
Luk said in the interview she noticed the decline of Cantonese in Guangzhou, the birthplace of the dialect, over the years.“Because in 2009 I went to Kwangchow, I [could] hear many people speaking Cantonese. But in 2017 I went to Kwangchow again, I just heard the people saying Putonghua instead of Cantonese.”
Luk said Beijing’s idea of using simplified Chinese and Putonghua is to “replace our culture, our own Cantonese, and traditional Chinese.”
“Because if you want to do something, want to control somebody, the first thing is to remove or eliminate or to change their own culture, religion, and other,” she said, stressing that simplified Chinese “omits some very, very important element of the character of [traditional] Chinese.”
She likened the situation to the plight the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Southern Mongolians have faced for decades.
“Actually, you can see the situation in Uyghur, Tibet, and South Mongolia, [where the CCP is] trying to ban students speaking their own language in primary and secondary school,” she said.
Luk is currently waiting for approval of her refugee status in Canada. She fled Hong Kong last December due to harassment by authorities over her involvement in the 2019 protests and fears for her safety, she told The Toronto Star in January.
“I’m now considering what I can do for Canada and Hong Kong and even the world just to promote human rights,” she told The Epoch Times.
The protests later morphed into a broader movement demanding greater democracy and freedoms in the face of the CCP’s growing control over Hong Kong. Over several months, millions of people protested; they were often met with riot police who fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse them.
