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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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Hong Kong seems to be doing better now, it’s fully politically pacified and the conclusion of the Jimmy Lai case marks the end of a big chapter in the city’s history. There were a lot of IPOs over the last year, it’s again the preferred listing location for a lot of regional / Sinosphere companies. The big quant shops are expanding their presence. A lot of bankers and lawyers are back from Singapore, which can never really replace what Hong Kong offers (and which has worse weather for much of the years, Hong Kong you can go walk on the peak in the morning in October and not feel like you’re hiking through a rainforest).

I’ve long considered moving there, although it would have to be for the right package and job, and I would want to at least try to learn Cantonese (mainly for my own amusement) which is notoriously difficult.

Yeah vibewise I visit a couple times a year for work and whatnot. Whole vibe in HK felt way more optimistic and cheerful back half of 2025 than it otherwise has in years.

I’ve long considered moving there, although it would have to be for the right package and job, and I would want to at least try to learn Cantonese (mainly for my own amusement) which is notoriously difficult.

Courtesy of too many web novels, I'm so Chinese that the nearest Chinatown is just "Town" to me. Unfortunately, I don't have the gumption to actually learn a fourth (fifth?) language, so I hope smart glasses and earbuds with live translation continue improving at the pace they are. Hopefully the Chinese Century will have Standard American as the lingua franca.

I do agree that HK seems quiet of late. Maybe too quiet. The majority of malcontents seem to have fled to the UK, which has embraced them with open arms. It certainly feels like half their doctors work for the NHS now, which I think is a questionable decision on their parts.

My take is that HK will likely continue being the financial capital, while Hainan becomes the cooler Shenzen. Of course, I doubt the CCP will object if more finance moves to the latter and makes HK obsolete.

I don't know Shenzhen is pretty cool already. I think you're right and no matter what a lot of finance will stay in Hong Kong. Hong Kong's western financial system is a bigger draw then the judges with wigs these days. Otherwise Hong Kong is seen a bit like Japan a bit stuffy and old hat. All the cool young entrepreneurs are in Shenzhen.

Is the CCP going to any particular effort to promote cantonese specifically? I would be unsurprised if they were pushing mandarin, although I haven’t seen any evidence of trying to promote it abroad(I have seen this for both French and Russian, but still YMMV).

The official language of Hong Kong is still Cantonese and the language policy of Hong Kong hasn't changed at all since the protests. Surprisingly few things have as Kong Hong was never actually a democracy. In Guangdong everything official, local governments, school and business is all in Mandarin. The only special status Cantonese has is that broadcasts are allowed to be in Cantonese likely this was allowed because of the previous status of Hong Kong as well as the amount of media produced.

The official languages of Hong Kong per the Basic Law agreed between Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping are English and "Chinese" with no version specified. Government documents are issued bilingually in English and standard written Chinese. This is supposed to be equally legible to speakers of any Chinese language because written Chinese is non-alphabetic, and is similar but different to the "written Cantonese" used by Hong Kongers for ordinary written communication or the Putonghua (written Mandarin) now taught in mainland schools. The government will conduct spoken business in English, Mandarin or Cantonese and all three spoken languages are taught in schools, although "written Cantonese" is not.

Yeah they’re not committed to aggressively stamping out Cantonese, if anything I think over the last decade there has been more of a vaguely nationalist drive to preserve Chinese culture including regional languages in a way that, in fifty years, might actually lead to the kind of thing you see in parts of Europe with declining regional languages. But for now Hong Kong is fine to keep using it.

I honestly don't know. I haven't heard of any efforts to impose Mandarin in HK, at least, which is where I'd imagine the friction would show.

Cantonese is declining due to a mix of intra-sinosphere immigration (tends to speak Mandarin), less push from education system and Hong Kong losing the media edge that it had for decades

Most Chinese speakers over 30 or so will have a bit of Cantonese just due to how dominant Hong Kong cinema and TV were across broader Chinese culture.

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