BEIJING (Reuters) - Hundreds of people took to the streets of the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou over the weekend to demand the government halt efforts to push aside the local Cantonese language, state media said on Monday.
The protest on Sunday was prompted by plans to switch most programing on Guangzhou television stations to the country's official language, Mandarin, feeding fears that the government wants to phase out Cantonese in official settings, reports said.
Some newspapers in Hong Kong, where Cantonese remains the main language of government, education and the man in the street, said demonstrators numbered more than 10,000, with participants singing and giving impassioned speeches in Cantonese.
The Global Times, a popular Chinese tabloid run by Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily, said the protest was peaceful and dispersed after a few hours.
"I stand for multiculturalism, and I strongly oppose the government's plan to promote Putonghua with administrative means," the report quoted one demonstrator as saying, referring to another name for the Mandarin Chinese language.
Beijing has promoted Mandarin for decades to unite a nation with thousands of dialects and numerous minority languages.
Read more at The Washington Post
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