Chinese leaders attend the closing session of the National People's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on March 12. A new law adopted this week requires preschool children to learn Putonghua, a national common language.Ng Han Guan/The Associated Press
In 1935, a group of left-wing students in Shanghai warned that ongoing efforts to reform the Chinese language and make it easier for the mostly illiterate population to learn risked “setting up a dictatorship of the Beijing speech.”
They supported replacing or supplementing Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet, but said this should be done not only for the mostly widely spoken form of Chinese, Mandarin, but also for the dozens of other languages used around the country.
This multiculturalist position was largely adopted by the Communist Party, then in the midst of a brutal civil war with the ruling Kuomintang, which saw language policy as a key means of maintaining and enforcing national unity.
When the Communists won the war in 1951, however, they reversed course, promoting instead a single national language, Putonghua, or “the common tongue.” Measures to promote greater literacy, such as the development of the Pinyin romanization system, were built on top of this language, which was itself heavily influenced by the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.
While the propagation of Pinyin and other educational reforms have essentially eliminated illiteracy in China, the country’s other Chinese and ethnic minority languages have suffered. Even once dominant regional languages, such as Cantonese in southern China, now yield to Putonghua, while many smaller tongues are teetering on the brink of extinction.
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This week, lawmakers meeting for the annual session of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament, adopted legislation that threatens to push many of those languages over the edge and further diminish even more widely spoken tongues.
Under the new law “promoting ethnic unity and progress,” the state will “comprehensively promote and popularize the national common language.”
“No organization or individual may hinder citizens from learning and using the national common language,” the law says. “Schools and other educational institutions shall use the national common language and script as the basic language and script for education and teaching.”
It requires preschool children to learn Putonghua and demonstrate a “basic grasp” of it by the time they graduate. When ethnic minority languages must be used alongside Putonghua, documents and pronouncements “shall emphasize the national common language and script in terms of position and order.”
While many minority languages already struggle in China and have seen the number of speakers shrink in the past century as a result of the dominance of Putonghua – just as in Canada minority languages and even French have a hard time resisting the pervasiveness of English – in recent years there has been an even more active attempt to curtail language rights and encourage non-Han ethnic groups to speak Putonghua.
Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, the focus of ethnic minority policy has been driven by an overriding concern about “separatism,” which in many cases has seen crackdowns on the promotion of cultural, religious and linguistic rights.
In Tibet, where Beijing has long suppressed local activism in the name of national security, hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children have been placed in government-run boarding schools, cut off from their families, languages and traditional culture. Throughout the region, as well as in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, textbooks in local languages have been replaced by ones in Chinese, and ethnic minorities are encouraged by massive propaganda posters to “Be civilized. Speak Putonghua.”
In the past, some activists have brought legal cases against the government to protect their languages, drawing on the Chinese constitution, which codifies the right of all ethnic groups “to use and develop their own spoken and written languages.”
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Such cases are almost never successful, however, and in the most prominent one, Tashi Wangchuk, a Tibetan language activist who spoke about his efforts to The New York Times, was jailed in 2018.
The new law explicitly warns that those who undermine “national unity,” which it states is based in part on a shared common language, could be prosecuted for “separatism.”
This could have ramifications beyond ethnic minority regions. One major distinction between Hong Kong and the rest of China is that the semi-autonomous territory’s dominant language is Cantonese, not Putonghua. Hong Kong also continues to use traditional Chinese characters, not the simplified versions used on the mainland.
For years, policy-makers in Beijing and Hong Kong have sought to promote Putonghua in the name of national unity, and proponents of Cantonese have warned the language could be pushed into minority status, as has happened in neighbouring Guangdong.
Some Cantonese activists have been investigated as part of national security probes in recent years, while others have gone into exile. Amid efforts to integrate Hong Kong into the Greater Bay Area − which also includes Shenzhen and Guangzhou − the new law risks further criminalizing any efforts to protect a language spoken by some 80 million Chinese.
James Griffiths is the author of Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language.