This could be a GQ question, but I’d prefer it here to open it up to more opinions, perhaps going beyond the factual answers.
The U.S. is divided (fairly mildly) between Blue States and Red States. Canada is divided (fairly mildly) between French-speaking regions and English-speaking regions.
How severe is the division in China between Mandarin-speaking regions and Cantonese-speaking regions? Is there any meaningful complaint among the Cantonese majority against Beijing’s rule? Or is the centralizing power of the communist party so strong that it overrides regional loyalties and interests?
I’m dead ignorant here, so dumb it down as much as you can…
Thanks!
(Not a homework essay! But it might help make a story I’m trying to write come across as a little less glaringly ignorant.)
I’d say Hong Kong and Guangdong vs. the rest of China is vaguely comparable to Quebec vs. the rest of Canada. The difference being, though, that there is no realistic likelihood of Guangdong or Hong Kong becoming independent, and that talk of such is much more suppressed.
In western China, then, you have ethnic Han Chinese vs. Arabs.
Cantonese people (named after the province of Canton, now usually known as Guangdong) do have a separate identity from the rest of China, but they are still ethnically Han Chinese. Maybe a more analogous situation would be Texans (or New Yorkers) vs. Other Americans.
The issue in China is that the Han majority speak more than one language. So, are you asking if the country is linguistically divided, ethnically divided, religiously divided, politically divided? For each of these, the answer is yes; however, the level of division is different for each one.
When I lived in Guangdong, I never heard anyone talk of independence for that province. Everyone I knew there certainly saw themselves as Chinese (except, of course, for the handful of foreigners I knew in my remote city).
I don’t recall any of the Chinese Muslims I’ve encountered either considering themselves to be Arabs. They certainly consider themselves to be Muslims.
There’s an ethnic group called the Uyghurs who live mostly in Xinjiang Province. There’s a history of conflict between the Uyghurs and the central government, based partly on ethnicity, partly on history and partly on religion (the Uyghurs are mostly Muslims). There are Uyghur separatists, and there has been a fair amount of violence in the past several years.
Uigurs are definitely not Arabs. I suppose they’re Turks, in a sense.
There are a great number of different subject races that are not Han. The Han say those people are Chinese. Not all of the non-Han agree, but what are they going to do? They don’t have the numbers to stand against the Han.
So, yes, and far more than you expect. The Cantonese/Mandarin split (basically within Han) is a medium-level split among Chinese. The Tibetan situation is quite a bit worse.
There are definitely divisions between the non-Han minorities and the majority. They aren’t treated particularly well. But I think the urban/rural divide lis the most pertinent divide in modern China.
I had thought – and please help me out if I’m wrong – that the ruling class in Beijing were mostly Mandarin-speakers and a minority. Is this completely incorrect?
Well, yes and no. They do speak Mandarin. But so does the great bulk of the Chinese population in a way. The issue is that local Mandarin dialects within the language, like Kurdish, are not always fully mutually intelligible. The Beijing dialect is usually classified as distinct, though it is apparently very similar to the northeastern dialect as a dialect and the “Standard Chinese” lingua franca generally. Even more confusingly the terms Standard Chinese and Mandarin are sometimes used interchangeably. So one can apparently be a native speaker of a local Mandarin dialect, say in the southwest and not have it be fully intelligible with the local Mandarin dialect in Beijing - but both may also speak Standard Chinese, which is much closer to the northeastern dialects generally which bridges the gap. If that makes any sense :).
So in a sense the local Beijing dialect is a minority one, yes. But in a larger sense not really since it is closer to Standard Chinese, which is the national language such as it is and variable in of itself.
ETA: Folks like even sven and China Guy who actually speak the lingo could probably go into more complexity of detail on this.
Yes. I’d always thought that since Mandarin Chinese was originally the provincial language of Beijing (or that area generally), that Beijing Chinese must be closest to the official standard.
But IME few Chinese see it that way. If you ask most people where they speak the best Mandarin Chinese (excluding “here”), they usually pick somewhere in the North but are at pains to say “not Beijing”.
I guess it’s similar to English in that the South of England generally is closer to RP than the North, but I certainly wouldn’t say that the London accent / dialect is closest to RP.
But just like with RP English, a news broadcast in Standard (Mandarin) Chinese would be intelligible to most people in China, even in Hong Kong.
Is this right? As an ethnic Chinese myself, I can only think of traditional and simplified, and most of the PRC uses simplified except for Hong Kong (and I guess Taiwan, if you count it as part of the PRC), and most people can kind of muddle through both even if all they know is the other (traditional is kind of like ye olde chinese).
Not all of the ethnic groups in the PRC speak the Chinese language as their main language. For example, there’s a Korean-speaking ethnic group located, unsurprising, close to North Korea and that ethnic group’s language is Korean, written in Hangeul. There are other ethnic languages written with their own scripts, too.
Well, ok, how big are these groups we’re talking about? I mean, I’m sure there’s some groups near the mexican border that speak only spanish, and those guys have funny accents (on the letters), but of the mandarin speaking groups, isn’t it right to say that they all share a common script?
Sure, I also guess it’s a bit of a stretch to say that there are 52 different languages when what you really mean are dialects (unless the previous poster really did mean to say 52 different languages, in which case I’m going to have to ask for cites again), but to an average English speaker, it’s hard to convey just how different Shanghainese is from mandarin. We’re not talking pidgin vs standard english here, or accents. Spoken, I wouldn’t understand a word of Shanghainese. My wife’s grandparents are Hainanese, and when they speak I understand not a single word. Her grandfather does speak some mandarin, though, and the written forms are all the same. His calligraphy is really beautiful, too.
