How Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protesters are using their native language to push back against Beijing

Menu 遮打革命 How Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protesters are using their native language to push back against Beijing Gwynn Guilford 4 hours ago  "The Huge Crowds of the Umbrella Fight/Chater Road"—a play on words that, as you can probably tell, only really makes sense in Cantonese.(Flickr user Kevin Law (this image has been cropped)) At the heart of the current friction between Hong Kong and mainland China isn’t just Hong Kong’s autonomy and political freedoms. It’s the territory’s language. Though they share many of the same Chinese characters, Mandarin and Cantonese use them in such divergent ways—in terms of both grammar and vocabulary—that they constitute two different writing systems. A Mandarin-only reader can’t understand written Cantonese; and a Cantonese-only reader would struggle to make sense of written Mandarin. The two also have distinctive pronunciation rules, which make the same characters sound different when said out loud by a speaker of each. China’s government has tried to insist that Cantonese isn’t really a language, and to suppress its use. But as with Bengali in the independence movement for Bangladesh, and the Soweto uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans in apartheid South African schools, Cantonese is beginning to take on a central role in Hong Kong’s resistance to the authority of mainland China. And a telling example of this is in the very name of the “Umbrella Movement,” as the protest movement has come to be called. ShareTap image to zoom  These posters from around Hong Kong use 雨傘, the word for “umbrella” used in the mainland-backed zhongwen writing system, which Hongkongers learn to write in public school and which is usually the formal system used in newspapers, etc. In Mandarin it’s pronounced yusan, but in Hong Kong’s streets, you’ll hear the Cantonese pronunciation, jyusaan.(Clockwise from top left: Savio Ho, Umbrella Creation, source unclear, Flickr user Yukikei, Kerim Friedman, Flickr user Yukikei (both images have been cropped)) Hong Kong protesters frequently write “Umbrella Movement” using the Mandarin word for “umbrella” (雨傘), because they grew up learning the Mandarin writing system, known as zhongwen, in school. They will also frequently write it with the Cantonese word 遮, since they picked up the Cantonese writing system pretty much everywhere else in Hong Kong. But the meaning of the Cantonese phrase 遮打 would be lost on a Mandarin-only speaker, particularly when you break the words down into the constituent parts. If read as Mandarin rather than Cantonese, the characters 遮打 are pronounced zhe da (pronounced “juh da”). Both are usually verbs; zhe means “to obscure” or “cover,” while da means “to hit” or “fight.” So to a Mandarin-reader, the Cantonese phrase doesn’t make much sense—it’s the “Cover-Hit Movement.” ShareTap image to zoom  Examples of “Umbrella Movement” rendered in Cantonese.(Clockwise from top left: Carol Hung, Ryan Wong, Umbrella Creation, The Civic Beat, both by 破折號 Dash) In Hong Kong Cantonese, however, those same two characters, while pronounced similarly to Mandarin—ze daa—mean something quite different: they’re the Cantonese transliteration of Chater Road, one of the downtown Hong Kong streets where the protesters camp out. The second character, 打, also means “to fight” in both Cantonese and Mandarin, notes Tammy Ho Lai-Ming, a literature professor at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). And it carries yet another layer of meaning, Ho explains: “The ‘打’ would, to a Cantonese speaker’s mind, mean ‘to attack’ or ‘knock down,’ and the target would be [Hong Kong chief executive] CY Leung or the HK government.” ShareTap image to zoom  ​(Legostudio, via HKU Cantonese's Facebook page) In short, when a Mandarin-reader looks at the Cantonese words for “Umbrella Movement,” she sees a fairly innocuous and somewhat nonsensical phrase. When a Cantonese-reader looks at them, the same set of characters are a play on words meaning both “Chater Road Movement” and, literally, “Umbrella Fight Movement”—or, more abstractly, “Umbrella Fight-Against-CY Leung Movement.” This distinction, so layered with meaning, is just one of the myriad differences between Mandarin—which is the Chinese government’s official national writing system—and a slew of regional writing systems using Chinese characters, of which Cantonese is a major example. And it runs contrary to Beijing’s long-standing insistence that Cantonese isn’t a real language, but a mere dialect of an older form of Han Chinese, from which the government’s official national language derives. The frequent and deliberate use of 遮 and other Cantonese phrases in Umbrella Movement slogans therefore symbolizes not just Hong Kong’s resistance to the Communist Party’s political values, but the defense of its distinct cultural identity, as well as the history of the autonomy Hongkongers are fighting to defend. The case for calling Cantonese a language ShareTap image to zoom  “Pocket first? Then we’ll occupy first,” this sign says in Cantonese. The “pocket” reference refers to the remarks by Carrie Lam, second-in-command to chief executive CY Leung, suggesting that Hong Kong accept—”pocket”—Beijing’s position on universal suffrage and hope for a better deal down the road. The placement of “first” at the end of the sentence is distinctly Cantonese.(Flickr user Kevin Law (this image has been cropped)) Dialects differ from accents in that they have their own distinct grammar, word choice, and common expressions (e.g. Glasgow English vs. Jamaican English). Languages, on the other hand, must be mutually unintelligible, even if they’re closely related—think Spanish and French. What China’s government calls “dialects” of the Chinese language family are not mutually intelligible in spoken form. A Mandarin-speaker can’t understand someone chatting in Cantonese or Hokkien (what’s used in Fujian Province), or vice versa. But because these seven dialects—Yue (e.g. Cantonese), Hakka, Min (e.g. Hokkien, Taiwanese), Mandarin, Wu, Xiang, and Gan—stem from the same ancient Chinese language, argues Beijing, they share a common writing system—which means they are mutually intelligible. ShareTap image to zoom  The seven major Sinitic (meaning, Chinese) language branches: Mandarin, Xiang, Gan, Wu, Yue, Min, and Hakka/Kejia. While the Chinese government says all originate from ancient Chinese, many scholar believe the latter three are offshoots of a different language.(Wikipedia) Even that, however, isn’t strictly true in the case of Cantonese. Though it uses Chinese characters, the Cantonese lexicon—its commonly used vocabulary—and grammar constitute a writing system different enough from Mandarin that they’re mutually unintelligible, says Robert Bauer of the University of Hong Kong, a leading expert on Cantonese linguistics. “If you were to show a colloquial text of written Cantonese to a [Mandarin reader] who knows no Cantonese, he or she would find most of it unintelligible,” says Bauer. “They are as different from each other as Portuguese and Italian.” China’s linguistic nationalism But if Cantonese is clearly a language, why does the Chinese Communist Party so rigorously deny it? As in Napoleon’s France and Franco’s Spain, the Chinese government’s assertion of a national language is a tool not just for national unification but for undermining regional identities that could foment resistance. The key isn’t just getting people to use spoken Mandarin, or putonghua; by forcing everyone to use zhongwen, the written form, the government could eventually blot out enough of the written record of regional Chinese languages that future generations will struggle to use them. ShareTap image to zoom  ​(Umbrella Creation's Facebook page) This policy has been highly successful in mainland China. Hong Kong, however, is proving trickier. During their colonial tenure, the British saw Cantonese as a useful barrier to communication between Hong Kong and the mainland, says Bauer. “As a consequence, Cantonese has thrived in Hong Kong and was not in competition with putonghua as it certainly has been on the mainland,” he says. And though Hong Kong students have long learned to write zhongwen, the Mandarin writing system, in school, the Cantonese language—spoken and written—is nonetheless “intimately interwoven with” the uniquely Hong Kong sociocultural identity that has emerged in the last three or four decades, says Bauer. The “mainlandization” of Hong Kong Since 1997, when the mainland regained control of Hong Kong from the British, the pressure to abandon spoken Cantonese in classrooms has intensified. Hong Kong’s education bureau recently sparked outrage (paywall) when it declared Cantonese “a Chinese dialect that is not an official language.” The status of Cantonese is now debated fiercely in Hong Kong society, says George Chen, a Yale world fellow and author of This is Hong Kong I Know. It has become part of a larger conversation about what the “mainlandization” of language, culture, education, and governance means for the territory. “Many young Hongkongers consider Cantonese as a language, a strong signal of how much the younger generations care about their unique Hong Kong identity,” says Chen. “The Hong Kong identity problem has attracted attention from Beijing, which has repeatedly said Hongkongers should recognize themselves first as ‘Chinese,’ not ‘Hongkonger.'” Cantonese and the independent Hong Kong identity ShareTap image to zoom  Written in Cantonese, this sign reads, “It’s that simple.”(破折號 Dash's Facebook page) Hongkongers are right to worry: The government’s control of education and the media have caused Cantonese to dwindle in the mainland region north of Hong Kong’s border. Even on the internet and mobile phones (link in Chinese), the government polices the use of anything besides putonghua/zhongwen. “This is why the battle for true autonomy in Hong Kong is so important,” says Victor Mair, a sinologist at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the foremost experts on the history of Chinese languages. “It is not just a matter of politics; without guarantees of relative freedom, Cantonese language and culture will quickly wither.” But for the moment, Cantonese is actually flourishing—thanks in no small part to social media, says Mair. In the past, Hongkongers had few opportunities to write in Cantonese, says Mair. Now they use it all the time on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. ShareTap image to zoom  Thanks to social media, more and more Hongkongers are writing Cantonese.(Reuters/Tyrone Siu) HKBU’s Ho and Yale’s Chen both note that this explosion of modern Cantonese use on social media is only reinforcing a shared Hong Kong identity. And this Cantonese consciousness has only become more overt during the Umbrella Movement protests—as embodied by the embrace of the Cantonese ze daa for “umbrella.” Chen cites another example—a pro-democracy slogan popular on social media—that embodies this linguistic defiance even better: 冇民主 冇公義. Non-Chinese readers would find it puzzling: It uses 冇 (mou, meaning “to lack”), a character that in zhongwen doesn’t exist. But to a Cantonese-reader, its meaning is clear: “Without democracy, there can be no justice.”  扎克伯格曰 The most important things Mark Zuckerberg just said in broken Chinese Gwynn Guilford & Nikhil Sonnad6 hours ago  Mark's Chinese "slayed" the crowd.(Reuters/Adnan Abidi) Whether part of a bid to get Facebook unblocked or, as he professes, because he “wants to study Chinese culture,” founder Mark Zuckerberg awed the internet on Wednesday (Oct 22) with a 30-minute interview at Beijing’s Tsinghua University—in Mandarin. “Mark Zuckerberg nails a Q&A in Chinese like it’s no big deal,” gushed the Silicon Valley Business Journal, observing that he “slayed the crowd.” The Facebook clip of the interview—posted without subtitles—elicited like upon like from adoring fans, noting how “impressive” he was. Behold the first two minutes:  Zuckerberg’s aplomb is indeed impressive. And for someone of his Mandarin level, speaking for 30 minutes and fielding questions isn’t easy. But those blown away by Zuck’s Chinese chinwag might want to know that though he’s clearly memorized a lot of relevant words, those were still shoehorned into a distinctly American grammatical order. Pronunciation is also a problem: He showed a plucky disregard for the tones that Mandarin has—one tonal slip-up had him saying that Facebook boasts eleven mobile users instead of 1 billion—and his enunciation was roughly on par with the clarity possible when someone’s stepping on your face. That said, Zuckerberg didn’t shy away from some tougher topics—and he even tried a few jokes. And regardless of the slip-ups, his audience clearly loved the fact that he made an effort. Here are the most insightful nuggets from Zuckerberg’s interview: The internet is very important: “The majority of people who don’t have internet, don’t have the internet because they don’t know why they want to use the internet. If you asked me—sorry, if I asked you—if you didn’t have a phone, computer or internet and I asked you, ‘Do you want to use internet?’ You maybe would ask me, ‘Why do I want internet?’ So a lot of problems. But… internet creates work opportunities and economic development. Very important.” His three reason for studying Chinese: 1) to speak with his grandma-in-law and other inlaws; 2) China is a great country, and he wants to study its culture; 3) Chinese is hard, and he loves challenges. The next big things in tech: “Facebook is 10 years old this year. So if I ask 10 years from now, what should we develop? I decided we should develop three things. First, we need to connect the entire world. We need everybody to use the internet. Second, we want to develop (in English) artificial intelligence. I think 10 years from now computers will be better than humans at reading, listening, talking, and other things. So we are developing this. Third, when everyone is using mobile phones, I believe the next platform will be (in English) virtual reality. Oculus is the first product, but we hope there will be many products. Those three things.” Advice to entrepreneurs: If it fails, try again. “I feel that the best companies are started not because the founder wanted a company but because the founder wanted to change the world…. If you decide you want to found a company you maybe start to develop your first idea. And hire lots of workers. But you maybe have lots of ideas and you don’t know which one is best. If the first idea isn’t good, then your company isn’t good. But if you decide to change the world you should try to develop more ideas. If any idea is very good later you found the company.” Facebook’s plan in China: “We’re already in China. We help Chinese companies grow their customers abroad. They use Facebook ads to find more customers. For example, Lenovo used Facebook ads to sell its new phone. In China I also see economic growth. We admire it. (in English) It’s, it’s…amazing. We want to help other parts of the world connect to China, such as large cities, national parks, (in English) um, yeah.” His favorite color: “I can’t choose red or green, because Facebook is blue!” Advice to founders: don’t give up. “I think the best thing to do is not give up. Founding a company is hard. Most of it isn’t smooth. You’ll have to make very hard decisions. You have to fire a few people. Therefore, if you don’t believe in your mission giving up is easy. The majority of founders give up. But the best founders don’t give up. Therefore, believe in your mission and don’t give up—very important.” Is his Chinese better than his (Chinese-Vietnamese-American) wife Priscilla’s? “In Chinese, I know more words. But she also speaks Cantonese. Her listening is better than mine. Mine is really awful. One day I asked her why my listening was so bad and she said ‘your listening is bad in English, too.'” Get the Quartz Daily Brief in your inbox:  For early morning delivery  遮打革命 How Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protesters are using their native language to push back against Beijing 4 hours ago 扎克伯格曰 The most important things Mark Zuckerberg just said in broken Chinese 6 hours ago FROZEN These are the conversations your colleagues are having about egg freezing 11 hours ago LIFE BEGINS AT 30 The Mac is back: Why Apple just set an all-time Mac sales record October 22, 2014 Google wants to “fix” email—by turning it into Google Now 11 hours ago P&L Boeing profits on demand for jets and a NASA contract 10 hours ago Here are some great holiday gifts for your favorite Joan Didion super-fan October 22, 2014 THE LONG GAME Warren Buffet just lost over $2 billion in two days October 22, 2014 Why more American pet store puppies are being banned October 22, 2014 Hong Kong’s Occupy Central now has its own video game October 22, 2014 P&L People really aren’t smoking much anymore in the US and Europe October 22, 2014 A London school teacher pays more UK tax than Facebook October 22, 2014 CHARTBOOOK Anyone who says the US economy is getting weaker is completely wrong October 22, 2014 P&L US Bank underscores US economic momentum October 22, 2014 Pandora just launched a Chartbeat for music October 22, 2014 How kids are screwing up dinner at Chipotle October 22, 2014 FAR AND WIDE Money keeps pouring into London’s tech sector—not all of it from the usual sources October 22, 2014 It’s time for Americans to stop giving their junk to the poor October 22, 2014 QUIET RIOT Kenny G just visited the Hong Kong protests October 22, 2014 These are the US colleges where student loan defaults are skyrocketing October 22, 2014 What happens when chemists don’t wash their hands October 22, 2014 More than 100 Indian policewomen are in Ebola-ravaged Liberia and the government has no plan to evacuate them October 22, 2014 DIVERGENT PATHS The gap between Chipotle’s success and McDonald’s woes is wider than ever October 21, 2014 Marissa Mayer’s vision for the future of Yahoo is starting to unfold October 21, 2014 Powered by WordPress.com VIP