Statistics on Shanghainese usage in home and office - Xinhua

[gato]

Basically the main debate focused on the choice between using Mandarin as the national language or having each region decide on their own language. Cantonese was never seriously proposed for the national language though.

You could be right. Do you have a source for this? I seem to remember having read recently that Cantonese came in second in the selection process and was a real contender, but I don't remember where I read that now. Maybe it was Jonathan Spence's "In Search of Modern China"? I don't have it handy to check just now.

Here's what Hu Shih, one of the key players in the May 4th cultural reform movement, had to say about Mandarin in a lecture at University of Chicago in 1933. He grew up in Anhui province, which is just west of Shanghai. I'm not sure what the dialect there is like, but someone I knew from there spoke Mandarin without any noticeable accent.

http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~mrl/HuShih/ChineseRenaissance.html

In the first place, the mandarin dialects which form the basis of the national language are undoubtedly the most widely spoken dialects of the country, being spoken from Harbin in the northeast to the provinces of Yunnan, Kweichow, and Szechuan in the southwest, covering more than 90 per cent of the territory of China proper and Manchuria. The people from any part of this vast territory can travel to any other part without ever feeling the need of changing their dialect. There are, of course, local variations; but it is a real fact of national importance that students from Yunnan and Kweichow and Szechuan can travel thousands of miles to study in Peking and find, on arriving there, that their dialects are regarded as the most generally understood dialects of the country.

Second, the mandarin dialects have been the most popular vehicle for the literature of the people during the last 500 years of its continuous development. All the folk songs of these provinces are composed in these dialects. The popular novels were all written in them: the earlier novels were written in the popular language of the north and of the middle Yangtze Valley, some in the dialect of Shantung, and the more recent ones such as the famous Dream of the Red Chamber in the pure dialect of Peking. All these great novels have been most widely read by almost everybody who can read at all; even the literati who pretended to condemn them as vulgar and cheap know them well through reading them stealthily in their boyhood days. They have been the greatest standardizes and the most effective popularizers of the national language, not merely within the region of the mandarin dialects, but far into the heart of the regions where the old dialects still reign. I, for example, came from the mountains of southern Anhwei where the people speak some of the most difficult dialects, and yet I read and immensely enjoyed many of those novels long before I left my ancestral home. It was from these novels that I learned to write prose in the pei-hua when I was only 15 years old. The hundreds of young authors who have come into literary prominence in the last 15 years have mostly learned their art and form of writing through the same channel.

[Claw]

You could be right. Do you have a source for this? I seem to remember having read recently that Cantonese came in second in the selection process and was a real contender, but I don't remember where I read that now. Maybe it was Jonathan Spence's "In Search of Modern China"? I don't have it handy to check just now.

This link gives a good overview of the process that led up to Mandarin being chosen as the official language: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/DeFr1950.html

Here is the most relevant excerpt:

On this issue the delegates split into two groups. One comprised delegates from the Mandarin-speaking area under the leadership of Wang Chao. The other consisted of representatives from the southern coastal area under the leadership of the Kiangsu-Chekiang bloc, which in turn was led by Wu Chih-hui and Wang Jung-pao of Kiangsu, the latter being the man who in 1906 had drafted the reply of the Ministry of Education rejecting the phonetic scheme proposed by Lu Kan-chang. The two groups were about equal in strength. The focal point of their disagreement was Wang Chao's insistence that the Mandarin pronunciation should be taken as the standard as against the equally strong contention of southern representatives that such a procedure would not meet the problem of southern dialect sounds not existing in Mandarin. "Southerners cannot get along without voiced sounds and the entering tone," maintained Wang Jung-pao. He was echoed in this by Wu Chih-hui, who argued that Germany was strong because its language contained many voiced sounds and that China was weak because Mandarin was lacking in them.+

After a month of stalemate Wang Chao called a separate meeting of the thirty delegates, a majority of those attending the conference, who were representatives either of the Mandarin area or of the provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien. Wang told his audience that the stand taken by the absent Kiangsu-Chekiang bloc was tantamount to advocating the pronunciation of this region as the national language, a course which if adopted would bring disaster to China for generations to come. He repeated this assertion to the plenary conference and also advanced a proposal for a new system of voting to resolve the deadlock. His suggestion, calling for one vote for each province regardless of number of delegates, was quickly identified as a means of giving ascendancy to the numerically preponderant Mandarin provinces. The conference was thrown into an uproar. Wang Chao attempted to exert pressure to split the southern group by threatening to walk out on what he referred to as the "Kiangsu-Chekiang Conference on Unification of Pronunciation." Finally he almost came to blows with Wang Jung-pao. One day, when the latter happened to use the colloquial Shanghai expression huang-pao ch`e "rickshaw," Wang Chao mis-heard it as the Mandarin oath wang-pa tan "turtle's egg," whereupon he bared his arms and chased the speaker out of the hall. That was the last of Wang Jung-pao at the conference.

The upshot of all this controversy was a complete victory for the Mandarin group. Wang Chao got his way in the matter of voting procedure and was thereby enabled to end the more than three months of discussion by receiving approval for a series of agreements to his liking.

Also, although Sun Yat Sen was a Cantonese speaker (although I think he was originally a native Hakka speaker), I'm pretty sure he would have advocated having Mandarin as the national language as well since he was firmly in the group who believed that the only way to have a strong China was to have one language, and Mandarin was the only dialect with which that could be practically done.