Some view the recent shutdown of a Cantonese advocacy group as the latest crackdown on civil liberties in the former British colony.
Cantonese language advocacy group in Hong Kong stopped operations after local officials raided the family house of its chairman last week over an essay published three years ago.was passed in 2020 that has since been used to curtail civil liberties in the city and stamp out anything perceived as a critique of or threat to Beijing’s expanding influence in the former British colony-turned-Chinese enclave.
Andrew Lok Han Chan, the chair and founder of Societas Linguistica Hongkongensis —which formed in 2013 and has advocated for the preservation of Cantonese or Guangdonghua, a language with origins in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong and also widely used in Hong Kong and Macau—announced onon Monday that he was disbanding the group “effective immediately,” to “ensure the safety of my family and former members.
Lok said that on Aug. 22, officers from Hong Kong’s national security department visited his former home and entered without a warrant.
“We've thought we can have freedom of speech or freedom of art inside the competition,” Lok says. “They were just writing fiction. So we thought they were OK. But now you see, even writing fiction is forbidden.”As the city’s lingua franca, Cantonese has earned a reputation of helping maintain Hong Kong’s identity, and by extension, autonomy from Chinese rule.
Since the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997, the rise in popular use of Mandarin or Putonghua—the “common tongue”—in the city was not particularly political in nature, says Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London. The number of Hongkongers speaking Mandarin has drastically increased in recent decades, from
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