In many countries, swearing at the government on the Internet is so common that no one bats an eye. But that’s no easy task in China’s heavily censored internet.
That doesn’t seem to have stopped Guangzhou residents from venting their frustration after their city – a global powerhouse of 19 million people – became the epicenter of a nationwide Covid outbreak, prompting lockdown measures once again.
“We had to lock down in April and then again in November,” one resident posted on Weibo, China’s restricted version of Twitter, on Monday – before circulating the post with profanity that included references to officials’ mothers. “The government hasn’t provided any subsidies – do you think my rent doesn’t cost money?”
Other users left posts with instructions that loosely translate to “go to hell”, while some accused the authorities of “judging nonsense” – albeit in less polite terms.
Such colorful posts are notable not only because they represent growing public frustration with China’s relentless zero-Covid policy – which uses emergency lockdowns, mass testing, extensive contact tracing and quarantines to stamp out infections as soon as they appear – but because they remain visible at all .
Normally, such harsh criticisms of government policies would be quickly removed by the government’s army of censors, yet these posts remained untouched for days. And this is, most likely, because they are written in a language that few censors will fully understand.
These posts are in Cantonese, which originates from the Guangdong province surrounding Guangzhou and is spoken by tens of millions of people across Southern China. It can be difficult for speakers of Mandarin – China’s official language and the government’s preferred language – to decipher, especially in its written and often complex slang forms.
And this appears to be just the latest example of how the Chinese are turning to Cantonese – an irreverent language that offers rich potential for satire – to express displeasure with their government without attracting the attention of all-seeing censors.
In September this year, US-based independent media watchdog China Digital Times noted numerous disgruntled Cantonese posts that bypassed censors in response to demands for mass Covid testing in Guangdong.
“Perhaps because Weibo’s content censorship system has difficulty recognizing the spelling of Cantonese characters, many posts in spicy, strong and simple language still survive. But if the same content is written in Mandarin, it is likely to be blocked or deleted,” said the organization, which is affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.
In nearby Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, anti-government protesters in 2019 often used Cantonese puns both for protest slogans and to guard against possible surveillance by mainland Chinese authorities.
Now, the Cantonese seem to be offering those fed up with China’s constant zero-Covid lockdowns an avenue for more subtle displays of dissent.
Jean-François Dupré, an assistant professor of political science at Université TÉLUQ who has studied Hong Kong’s language policy, said the Chinese government’s shrinking tolerance for public criticism has pushed its critics to “innovate” in their communication.
“It seems that using non-Mandarin forms of communication could allow dissenters to avoid online censorship, at least for a while,” Dupré said.
“This phenomenon testifies to the lack of confidence of the regime and the growing paranoia and the continued willingness of citizens to resist despite the dangers and obstacles.”
Although Cantonese shares much of its vocabulary and writing system with Mandarin, many of its slang terms, phrases and everyday phrases have no equivalent in Mandarin. Its written form also sometimes relies on rarely used and archaic characters or characters that mean something completely different in Mandarin, so Cantonese sentences can be difficult for Mandarin readers to understand.
Compared to Mandarin, Cantonese is highly colloquial, often informal and lends itself easily to wordplay – making it suitable for inventing and articulating barbs.
When Hong Kong was rocked by anti-government protests in 2019 – fueled in part by fears that Beijing was infringing on the city’s autonomy, freedoms and culture – these features of Cantonese came into focus.
“Cantonese was, of course, an important carrier of political grievances during the 2019 protests,” Dupré said, adding that the language gave “a strong local flavor to the protests.”
He pointed out how entirely new written characters were born out of the pro-democracy movement – including one that combined the characters for “liberty” with a popular profanity.
Other works in written characters illustrate the endless creativity of the Cantonese, such as a stylized version of “Hong Kong” that, when read sideways, becomes “add oil” – a rallying cry for protests.
Protesters also found ways to protect their communications, wary that online chat groups – where they held rallies and protested against the authorities – were being monitored by mainland agents.
For example, because spoken Cantonese sounds different from spoken Mandarin, some people have experimented with romanizing Cantonese—spelling out the sounds using the English alphabet—making it virtually impossible for a non-native speaker to understand.
And while the protests died down after the Chinese government imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020, the Cantonese continue to offer the city’s residents an avenue to express their unique local identity — something people have long feared they would lose. as the city is drawn further from Beijing. handle.
For some, using Cantonese to criticize the government seems particularly appropriate, given that the central government has aggressively pushed for the use of Mandarin nationwide in education and everyday life – for example, in television broadcasts and other media – often at the expense of regional languages and dialects.
Those efforts turned into a national controversy in 2010 when government officials proposed increasing Mandarin programming on the mainly Cantonese television channel Guangzhou — angering residents who have engaged in rare mass street rallies and clashes with police.
It’s not just the Cantonese affected – many ethnic minorities have expressed concern that the decline of their native language could spell the end of cultures and ways of life they say are already under threat.
In 2020, students and parents in Inner Mongolia staged mass school boycotts over a new policy that replaced the Mongolian language with Mandarin in elementary and middle school.
Similar fears have long existed in Hong Kong – and increased in the 2010s as more Mandarin-speaking mainlanders began living and working in the city.
“An increasing number of Mandarin-speaking students have enrolled in Hong Kong schools and are seen commuting between Shenzhen and Hong Kong on a daily basis,” Dupre said. “Through these meetings, the language change that has taken place in Guangdong has become quite visible to the people of Hong Kong.”
He added that these concerns were fueled by local government policies that emphasized the role of Mandarin and referred to Cantonese as a “dialect” – angering some Hong Kongers who saw the term as a fraud and argued it should be referred to as a “language” instead. his.
In the past decade, schools across Hong Kong have been encouraged by the government to switch to using Mandarin in Chinese lessons, while others have switched to teaching simplified characters – the written form preferred on the mainland – instead of the traditional characters used in Hong Kong. .
There was further outrage in 2019 when the city’s education chief suggested that the continued use of Cantonese over Mandarin in the city’s schools could mean Hong Kong loses its competitive edge in the future.
“Given Hong Kong’s rapid economic and political integration, it would not be surprising to see Hong Kong’s language regime align with that of the mainland, especially in promoting Mandarin,” Dupré said.
This is not the first time that people on the mainland have found ways to bypass censors. Many use emoji to represent taboo phrases, English abbreviations to represent Mandarin phrases, and images such as cartoons and digitally altered photos, which are harder for censors to track.
But these methods, by their nature, have their limits. Instead, for jaded Guangzhou residents, Cantonese offers an endless linguistic landscape with which to lash out at their leaders.
It’s not clear whether these more subversive uses of Cantonese will encourage greater solidarity among its speakers in southern China — or whether they could encourage the central government to further curtail the use of local dialects, Dupré said.
For now, however, many Weibo users have embraced the rare opportunity to express their frustration with China’s zero-Covid policy, which has hit the…
