A call by officials in southern China to ditch Cantonese in favour of Mandarin for prime-time TV shows Wednesday sparked fears about the future of the dialect.

Nanfang Daily, a mainland newspaper, reported that the People's Poliitical Consultative Conference in Guangzhou had written to the local government calling for the change on local TV ahead of the Asian Games in November.

Adopting China's official language, also known as Putonghua, would promote unity, "forge a good language environment" and cater to non-Cantonese-speaking Chinese visitors at the huge sporting event, authorities were quoted as saying.

But the move has lead to fears among some Cantonese-speakers, who fear the decline of a language which serves as the mother tongue in Hong Kong, Macau, China's southern Guangdong province, and which is widely spoken throughout overseas Chinese communities.

Mainland China made Putonghua the country's official language in 1982, leading to bans on the use of the country's myriad dialects at many radio and television stations.

"Is the change really necessary? If television stations cannot broadcast in Cantonese, the new generations of Guangdong people would not know how to speak their own language in the long run," a Guangzhou resident wrote online.

"All young people in Guangzhou can speak Putonghua. But the dialect presents the Canton culture. We have to support and use it in daily life," Luo Bihua, a clerk in Guangzhou, told the Post.

TV stations in Guangdong, which has about 110 million people, are allowed to broadcast in Cantonese only because of its proximity to Hong Kong, according to the South China Morning Post.

Guangzhou once spearheaded China's economic reform, but was soon overtaken by cities such as Shanghai and Beijing. The city is now filled with migrant workers from other parts of China who do not speak Cantonese.

Local authorities see the Asian Games an opportunity to remake Guangzhou's image and reaffirm its status as one of the mainland's key cities.

earlier related report

Google says still waiting for China licence decision
Beijing (AFP) July 7, 2010 –

Google's application for renewal of its licence to operate in China, the world's largest Internet market, is still under review, a company spokeswoman and a government official said Wednesday.

The US web giant, embroiled in a row with Beijing over state censorship, is awaiting word that its Internet Content Provider licence — vital to its operations in a country with more than 400 million web users — is still valid.

Google China spokeswoman Marsha Wang, who said the company was still awaiting a final decision, explained that its ICP licence remains valid as long as the government has not expressly rejected it.

"The licence runs till 2012. The licence needs to be checked every year," Wang told AFP.

"Everything will be as usual if the company passes the check," she said, however adding that the government could opt to cancel the licence ahead of the 2012 deadline.

"We have not received any information that it is invalid now," Wang said.

An official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the main regulator of China's Internet industry, told AFP that Google's application was still under consideration.

"We need time to review because they submitted the documents quite late," said the official, who asked not to be named. He added that he could not say when a reply could be expected.

Google said last week that it would stop automatically redirecting Chinese users to an unfiltered site in Hong Kong, a process it began in March in response to state censorship and cyberattacks it claims came from China.

All mainland users are now directed to a new landing page on google.cn, which links to the Hong Kong site.

"It's clear from conversations we have had with Chinese government officials that they find the redirect unacceptable — and that if we continue redirecting users, our Internet Content Provider licence will not be renewed," Google's chief legal officer David Drummond said on the company's official blog.

"Without an ICP licence, we can't operate a commercial website like google.cn — so Google would effectively go dark in China," he said.

"This new approach is consistent with our commitment not to self-censor and, we believe, with local law."

A web page maintained by Google on the accessibility to its services in mainland China, google.com/prc/report.html, on Wednesday listed its web search service as "partially blocked" for the past week.

AFP attempts on Wednesday to use the Google Suggest function, which provides users with suggested words as a they type a query into the Google search box, in mainland China were unsuccessful.

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