LiberalSoCalist

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • The majority of that age range still considers China an enemy, but a tiny fraction of ambivalent onlookers out of an overwhelming majority of a reflexively anti-China populace is enough for the Economist to dedicate an article to a fucking YouGov poll.

    It’s just another pearl-clutching “what’s wrong with today’s youths” headline to panic the elderly while flattering compliant millennials/zoomers for being one of the few (despite still being the majority!) “good ones” that march goose-step with consensus Western political thought.
















  • Chaak-ming Lau, an assistant professor of linguistics at the Education University of Hong Kong, believes that despite increased use of Mandarin in Hong Kong society, the city is not at risk of losing Cantonese. In Hong Kong’s 2021 census, over 6.3 million people aged 5 and up still have Cantonese as their usual spoken language. The Hong Kong government’s official stance is promoting biliteracy in English and written Chinese, and trilingualism in English, Putonghua, and Cantonese. And in the Ethnologue, the world’s most comprehensive catalog of languages, Cantonese—as part of the Yue Chinese family—has “institutional vitality,” which means communities and institutions use it extensively. “Cantonese is very far from being endangered,” Lau tells TIME.

    6.3 million out of 7 million people still use it as their main language. I can see how calling for the “preservation of Cantonese” could be viewed as a separatist dogwhistle. The essay that caught the attention of the government was one that described the future of Hong Kong as one where Cantonese and local culture is all but wiped out by the mainland government in 20 years. One character in the story calls the protagonist who grew up in England “more qualified to be a Hong Konger than any of us” because they were saved from the see see pee mind virus. It’s very funny.




  • 21 > 1.6

    If you’re only looking at the “immediate action” options it’s 4.5% independence vs 1.6% unification

    Grouping the camps together, the graph shows 25% vs 8% currently while not too long ago in 2018 it was 20% vs 16%. It’s a contentious issue, and opinions wax and wane depending on the diplomatic situation with the only consistency being that the majority of people favor maintaining the status quo. However, I think as more of the older generations die off, much like in South Korea, identification with a cross-border national project will likely diminish.