Dialect and Nationalism in China, 1860–1960

Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, 2018

Is Hong Kong poetry Chinese poetry, poetry in Chinese, Sinophone poetry, or something else? For that matter, what is the relationship between Sinophone literature and Chinese literature? Scholars have often called on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “minor literature” to explain, expand, and expound upon the concept of the Sinophone. But if the proper –phone of Hong Kong literature is not Mandarin but Cantonese, then D & G’s specification that a “minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language” but is instead what “a minority constructs within a major language” should both raise doubts about the applicability of the Sinophone designation to writing from Hong Kong and open up new possibilities for thinking about a Sinophone literature written by non-minority writers from mainland China. To that end, this paper reads the recent work of Hong Kong-based poet Cao Shuying 曹疏影 (b. 1979), a woman raised in Harbin who writes in Mandarin, and her husband, Liu Waitong (Liao Weitang) 廖偉棠 (b. 1975), who grew up in Zhuhai, writes in both Mandarin and Cantonese, and has gained prominence in Hong Kong as a cultural commentator and public intellectual. Looking in particular at Liu’s poem “Over the Counter-Revolution” 鳩嗚之詩, written in the aftermath of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, and Cao’s 2012 poem “Hong Kong” 香港 (from which the title of this paper is derived), it discusses how their engagements and positioning vis-à-vis the broader circles of Hong Kong and mainland poetry and their dialogues with the traditions of Chinese literature offer answers and visions for the Sinophone status of Hong Kong writing and the possibility of a minor mainland literature that could satisfy the Sinophone. The paper ends with a consideration of the Sinophone vis-à-vis another of Deleuze and Guattari’s influential concepts, the rhizome.

Theory and Society, 2020

How we think national standard languages came to dominate the world depends on how we conceptualize the way languages are linked to the people that use them. Weberian theory posits the arbitrariness and constructedness of a community based on language. People who speak the same language do not necessarily think of themselves as a community, and so such a community is an intentional, political, and inclusive production. Bourdieusian theory treats language as a form of unequally distributed cultural capital, thus highlighting language's classed nature. The rise of standard languages thus reflects a change in the class structure of a nationalizing society. In contrast, I move beyond the familiar Western cases on which these theories are based to reveal the shortcomings of both these theoretical approaches. China, with an exceptionally artificial national standard language that was promulgated by the state in an extremely top-down process, highlights the importance of intentionality in both the design of the language and the social function it was supposed to play. Building on Weber and Bourdieu, I argue that even egalitarian language standardization projects, such as the Chinese case, can result in unintended new hierarchies of privilege and power, outrunning the best intentions of their designers.

Journal of Chinese Overseas, 2021

Since independence in 1965, the Singapore government has established a strongly mandated education policy with an English-first and official mother tongue Mandarin-second bilingualism. A majority of local-born Chinese have inclined toward a Western rather than Chinese identity, with some scholars regarding English as Singapore’s “new mother tongue.” Other research has found a more local identity built on Singlish, a localized form of English which adopts expressions from the ethnic mother tongues. However, a re-emergent China and new waves of mainland migrants over the past two decades seem to have strengthened Chinese language ideologies in the nation’s linguistic space. This article revisits the intriguing relationships between language and identity through a case study of Chineseness among young ethnic Chinese Singaporeans. Guided by a theory of identity and investment and founded on survey data, it investigates the Chinese language ideologies of university students and their age...

2006

Language & Communication, 2021

This special issue explores the contested notion of Chineseness through an examination of the language ideologies and practices of those who are arguably on its margins. The six ethnographic cases presented in this issue not only shed light on how language mediates the relationship between race, ethnicity, and nationality, but also reveal the myriad ways in which ideologies of language, race, and nation work together to produce a variety of racial and ethnic subject positions. Expanding the scope of raciolinguistics, they demonstrate why we cannot lose sight of China and Chineseness when studying the relations between language, race, and ethnicity.

The so-called Chinese diasporas, i.e. Chinese communities outside Greater China (China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), have traditionally been dialect dominant; that is, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants are speakers of especially Southern) dialects. Cantonese and Hokkien are two of the most prominent dialects. With globalization and the rise of China as a world politico-economic power, the national, standardized variety, Putonghua, is gaining particular prestige amongst the Chinese diasporas. For example, all the Cantonese schools for British Chinese children in the UK now also teach Putonghua, but none of the Putonghua schools teach Cantonese. Using ethnographic interviews with and participant observation of Chinese people of different generations in various diasporic communities, this paper examines the changing hierarchies of varieties of Chinese, the implications of such changes for the education and identity development of the young, and the constitution of a (speech) community in the post-modern era. It focuses on language attitude and linguistic practices (including literacy practices). It also investigates the tensions between the competing ideologies and discourses on national and ethnic identities, nationalism, community relations and cultural values.

Comparative Studies in Society and History

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, a frequent claim among speakers of local Chinese languages (called fangyan in Chinese) is that their native languages preserve the language of antiquity better than the Beijing-based national language, Mandarin. This paper explores the origin of these claims and probes their significance in the making of the Han ethnoracial collective identity. I argue that claims of linguistic proximity to the imagined ancient origins of Chinese civilization represent a form of “hegemonic Han-ness”—an idealized form of the Han collective identity that was both internally hegemonic, in that it was meant to supersede other expressions of Han-ness, and externally hegemonic, in that it was meant to uphold the superiority of the Han people over other ethnoracial groups. From Zhang Taiyan, whose work provided a model for drawing linguistic connections between contemporary local languages and the language spoken at the dawn of Chinese civilization, to local ga...

The so-called Chinese diasporas, i.e. Chinese communities outside Greater China (China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan), have traditionally been dialect dominant; that is, the vast majority of Chinese immigrants are speakers of (especially Southern) dialects. Cantonese and Hokkien are two of the most prominent dialects. With globalization and the rise of China as a world politico-economic power, the national, standardized variety, Putonghua, is gaining particular prestige amongst the Chinese diasporas. For example, all the Cantonese schools for British Chinese children in the UK now also teach Putonghua, but none of the Putonghua schools teach Cantonese. Using ethnographic interviews with and participant observation of Chinese people of different generations in various diasporic communities, this paper examines the changing hierarchies of varieties of Chinese, the implications of such changes for the education and identity development of the young, and the constitution of a (speech) community in the post-modern era. It focuses on language attitude and linguistic practices (including literacy practices). It also investigates the tensions between the competing ideologies and discourses on national and ethnic identities, nationalism, community relations and cultural values.

Journal of Asian Studies, 2018

Scholars who study language often see standard or official languages as oppressive, helping the socially advantaged to entrench themselves as elites. This article questions this view by examining the Chinese case, in which early twentieth-century language reformers attempted to remake their society’s language situation to further national integration. Classical Chinese, accessible only to a privileged few, was sidelined in favor of Mandarin, a national standard newly created for the many. This article argues that Mandarin’s creation reflected an entirely new vision of society. It draws on archival sources on the design and promulgation of Mandarin from the 1910s to the 1930s to discuss how the way the language was standardized reflected the nature of the imagined future society it was meant to serve. Language reform thus represented a radical rethinking of how society should be organized: linguistic modernity was to be a national modernity, in which all the nation’s people would have access to the new official language, and thus increased opportunities for advancement.

Global Chinese, 2018

Researchers have documented ideologies of Mandarin Chinese in contexts such as Hong Kong and Taiwan with which the mainland China special political links (see the case of Taiwan Mandarin by Chen in this volume). Hua and Wei (2014) remind us of some notable language-related attempts made at a political level to foster better communication between people who do not use the same Chinese written characters, by for example publishing a cross-strait dictionary which would “facilitate cultural exchanges between the people on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait who use different Chinese written characters, different words and phrases, and different pronunciations” (327). Studies have also looked in to the use of Chinese in countries where there is a significant presence of Chinese speaking population, for example, in Singapore and Malaysia (Tan 2006; Phooi-Yan Lee and Ting 2016). The publication Global Chinese Dictionary, for example, is aimed at facilitating cross-cultural communication among Chinese speaking population residing in such different geo-political contexts (Hua and Wei 2014)...

Global Chinese, 2021

The study investigated the use of Mandarin and Chinese dialects, and attitudes towards these languages among the Foochow living in Sibu, Sarawak, Malaysia. The study involved 408 Foochow respondents (204 children, 204 parents). As most of the respondents’ close friends, neighbours and colleagues were Foochow, and Chinese in general, Foochow and Mandarin were the two main languages used, but English, Malay and Iban were sometimes used with people from other ethnic groups. More parents felt at ease speaking Foochow in all situations but more children felt that it is nothing special to speak their dialect. The most cherished and emotionally expressive language for the parents was Foochow but for their children, it was Mandarin. More parents were aware of cultural associations and activities than their children. They believed that the use of Chinese dialects will decrease in future and intergenerational transmission of the dialect is important. Yet they were still looking to cultural as...

2017

To date, there has not been a large corpus of research looking at how different Chinese populations perceive language to be a part of their Chinese ethnicity. Even where this has been done, no attempts have been made to compare these perceptions across Chinese populations of different polities, to see if and how they differ. To fill this gap, this paper examines and compares the relationship between Mandarin-Chinese, " dialects " , and English, and the construction of Chinese ethnicity amongst Chinese Malaysians, Chinese Singaporeans, and Mainland Chinese. It does this through a questionnaire study employing 100 participants from each group, taking into account beliefs about the importance of these languages to the everyday experience of being Chinese, self-declared language proficiency, and self-declared language use. The results of the study suggest that " dialects " are becoming less important to Chinese ethnicity amongst all three groups, particularly amongst Chinese Singaporeans. Meanwhile, English is becoming more important amongst Chinese Malaysians and Chinese Singaporeans, once again particularly amongst the latter. While Chinese Malaysians continue to perceive Mandarin-Chinese as being the language most important to Chinese ethnicity, Chinese Singaporeans' beliefs reflect English's dominance over Mandarin-Chinese in nearly every aspect of everyday social life. These findings underscore how Chinese ethnicities in different parts of the world need to be understood on their own terms, and how language can be a vital clue as to how different Chinese ethnicities are constructed in the global context.

2017

Decolonizing counter-narratives to Malaysia's official national history are insufficient to account for the complex legacies of nationalism in Malaysia, and its relationship with Chineseness, race, and colonialism. This dissertation close reads the fictional works of three contemporary Mahua (Malaysian Chinese) authors – Zhang Guixing, Ng Kim Chew and Li Tianbao – to argue that Mahua identity is haunted by a nationalistic Chineseness deriving from late 19th and early 20th century mainland China, which defines itself on the basis of an archaic, civilizational imaginary, with undertones of racial and cultural purity. By complicating recuperative but reductive accounts of Hua communism that stress their nationalistic contributions, and subverting diasporic fascination with a literary and cultural China (wenhua Zhongguo) ideal, their fictional histories provide postcolonial critiques of the legacies of Hua nationalism, revealing how it appropriates and translates turn-of-the-century nationalistic Chineseness as a response to local and regional politics.

1998