Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, has now seen two weeks of demonstrations by proponents of the Cantonese dialect, fearful that it may be eclipsed by Putonghua, the 'common language'.
Today Putonghua is spoken across China but that is a very recent phenomenon. Mao Zedong certainly didn't speak it. His Hunan dialect was unintelligible to most people. Similarly, Deng Xiaoping's Sichuan dialect was a real challenge to speakers of standard Putonghua.
Even the late Zhao Ziyang, the popular party leader put under house arrest for sympathising with the students in Tiananmen Square, was difficult to understand. His posthumous memoirs were based on secretly recorded tapes, which at times were difficult to decipher because of his heavy Henan accent.
So, even though the central government has been pushing Putonghua for more than half a century, it is only relatively recently that national leaders have been able to speak it well.
Even today, filmgoers often criticise producers for having old revolutionary leaders such as Mao speak perfect Putonghua in historical movies. However, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has decreed that national leaders, when depicted in historical films, should speak standard Putonghua, and so historical accuracy has lost out to political correctness.
While recent attention has focused on Cantonese, China is linguistically rich and the people of each region delight in their own dialects, cuisine and heritage. In fact, Chinese culture is a collection of separate cultures, each of which needs to be respected and preserved.
