Protests against suppression of Cantonese speaking tradition

In July 2010, a number of 20 and 30 years old Guangzhou residents, mostly university and high school students, have begun to stage small scale flash mob style of protests against the government proposed plan to replace Cantonese broadcasting with Standard Mandarin, also called Putonghua. The protests were mostly in the form of slogans shouting and singing of popular Cantonese pop songs, and internet social networking tools such as Twitter, Google Gmail, Chinese forms of micro-blog were used for communication, as well as mobile phone text messaging.

Background

The protest by the young people had started when the local committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference urged the Guangzhou government to replace Cantonese with Mandarin on Guangzhou TV's main shows during the coming Asian Games at the end of this year.^[1]

Big rally on 25 of July

On 25/7/2010, around the entrance of a railway station, about 3000 Guangzhou residents staged a peaceful protest which is mainly consisted of slogan shouting. Large number of police were present, but there was no physical clashes between the protesters and the police, and the protesters went home peacefully after two hours of shouting. ^[2]

"Cantonese Set Sail. Mandarin shut up". "煲冬瓜"(Bou1 Dung1 Gwa1) means "to boil winter-melon" is a nickname of Putonghua" in Cantonese.
"Mandarin Promotion Machine: Destroyer of Mother Tongue. Guangzhou, the next will definitely be you!"
Pictures of July 25 Pro-Cantonese language rally
Guangzhou Metro TV system was hacked and it only showed 广州人 (Guangzhou people) on the screen.