An immodest proposal: "Boycott the Chinese Language"

So argues Anders Corr in the Journal of Political Risk, 7.11 (November, 2018):

"Boycott the Chinese Language: Standard Mandarin is the Medium of Chinese Communist Party Expansion"

What?  Are my eyes deceiving me?  Did he really say that?

Starting right from the first paragraph, we can see that the author is serious:

China is one of history’s most dangerous countries. In August, the United Nations reported that China is holding approximately one million minority Muslims in Xinjiang concentration camps. China supports anti-democratic regimes and terrorist groups worldwide. Its military is seeking to expand its territory in: Japanese and South Korean areas of the East China Sea; Philippine, Malaysian, Bruneian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese parts of the South China Sea; and Indian and Bhutanese territory in the Himalayan mountains. President Xi Jinping has since 2013 increased military spending, hyped China’s nationalism, repressed minorities and human rights activists, eliminated term limits on his increasingly personal form of rule, and extended the geographic reach and individual depth of state surveillance.

The author's opposition to "the Chinese Language" is not against all Sinitic languages per se, but only against Putonghua (Modern Standard Mandarin) as it is packaged and promoted by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party).  In fact, Corr is proactively in favor of Cantonese, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, and all the other Sinitic languages and topolects, not to speak of Tibetan, Uyghur, Mongolian, and the numerous non-Sinitic languages in the PRC that are threatened by the manner in which Putonghua is forced upon them.  What exercises Corr is the CCP's use of Putonghua as an instrument of aggrandizement, both globally and domestically.

Here are some passages from Corr's article that deal specifically with language issues:

PRC Mandarin has since 1949, when the CCP captured the Chinese state, extended the CCP’s power and influence among minority language populations, for example in the provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet. PRC Mandarin is therefore a tool of CCP power, and is benefitted when democratic governments and international organizations translate the languages of democratic countries, for example Spanish, Hindi and English, into China’s simplified characters. The PRC preference for “one China”, which includes democratic Taiwan against its wishes, is reified when we fail to distinguish between PRC and Taiwanese Mandarin. Democratic governments support China’s attempts at extension of its authoritarian system when they allow, for example, China’s state-funded Confucius Institutes to teach PRC-style Mandarin on their soil. While China is actively obliterating the Tibetan, Uyghur, and other non-Mandarin languages of China, the U.S. and our democratic allies should not afford CCP-funded PRC Mandarin teachers with privileged access to our college students.

…

Finland faced a similar threat of authoritarian influence at the turn of the 19th century from Russia, called Russification. In their own cultural and national defense, the Finnish in 1901 used a language boycott against Russian to strengthen their independence and resist Russia’s attempts at absorption, as Russia de facto annexed much of Eastern Europe following World War II. Similar language boycotts, or conscious shunning strategies, were used by European nation-builders against church Latin after the Reformation,  Icelanders against Danish starting in the 17th century, Bangladeshis against Urdu in the late 1940s, and South Africans against Afrikaans starting in 1976. All of these language movements were ways that local cultures used to resist their unwanted assimilation by outside cultures.  Today, when unwanted CCP influence is spreading worldwide, a boycott of PRC Mandarin would help relatively permeable democratic cultures resist the CCP.

…

Democracies respect and defend their minorities and the rights of those minorities. While democracies allow the majority to rule, they ensure the rights of minorities in their constitutions with a bill of rights or a recognition of universal human rights. Japan, the United States and the Philippines, for example, have rich linguistic histories that include speakers of many Sinitic languages and dialects, and both traditional and simplified Chinese characters. Most Philippine Sinitic speakers, for example, use the Hokkien language and traditional characters, which is different than Mandarin.

In Taiwan, the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government from 1945 to 1987 repressed the local language, Taiwanese Hokkien, and promoted Mandarin. The Kuomintang shared a preference for Mandarin with their Communist enemies in mainland China because both parties sought to extend the influence and territory of China. Since 1945, Mandarin in Taiwan has gradually replaced Hokkien. While modern democratic Taiwan stopped repressing the Hokkien language and retains its claim to the South China Sea only to please a relatively small faction of voters, the trend of increased Standard Mandarin use there is helpful to Communist China, which seeks to remove the cultural particularities and fragile new democracy of Taiwan, and absorb the currently independent country as its own territory. In the 1990s supporters of Taiwan independence sought to differentiate between PRC and Taiwanese Mandarin, replacing the PRC’s Standard Mandarin in the educational system with Taiwanese Mandarin. But they failed. They should take up the effort again if they want to improve their chances at remaining independent from the mainland.

…

Hong Kong is also worried about Chinese authorities forcing Mandarin on their majority, which are Cantonese speakers. A mainland Chinese professor recently ignited controversy for asserting that Cantonese is “merely a dialect” and proposing that Mandarin should be the official language of Hong Kong. When the CCP sees an opportunity, it will likely seek to replace Cantonese in Hong Kong with Mandarin. Judging from recent policy changes in Hong Kong regarding language usage in the educational system and other socioeconomic and political spheres where Mandarin is already displacing Cantonese, it could happen fairly quickly.

…

The CCP (and China’s Nationalist Kuomintang Party before them) used Mandarin to engage in state-building throughout the 20th century. The founder of modern Chinese nationalism, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, led the 1911 revolution. He advocated democracy, but he was also a social Darwinian, allied with the Russian communists, and constructed the idea, still powerful today, of the Han race and Chinese nation as in competition with first the Manchus and then white imperialism, including a war between the “white and yellow races”. The Kuomintang and then the CCP were deeply influenced by Sun Yat Sen’s racist nationalism, and sidelined non-Mandarin Sinitic languages and the cultural diversity of China to concentrate power in Beijing and create the expanding nationalist state that is China today.

…

Let’s save our multicultural bilingualism for more Taiwanese Mandarin, Hokkien, and Tagalog, for example. Let’s help the smaller struggling languages worldwide, and the biggest international languages now used by democracies. Let’s learn English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Japanese, Punjabi, German, Javanese, Telugu, and French. Those in favor of democracy and reform in Vietnam should be given a podium to speak in Vietnamese. Even Standard Mandarin would be welcome, when it is spoken by Beijing’s persecuted human rights lawyers. Let’s recognize and support Taiwanese Mandarin for much-needed reinforcement to Taiwan’s democratic independence.

These passages are presented by Corr in the context of a hard-hitting, closely reasoned denunciation of the PRC's aggressive behavior abroad and its repressive regime at home.  Corr is not opposed to Putonghua itself, but only to its use by the CCP to further its strategic, political, and ideological goals.  As such, he sees Putonghua as a legitimate target for an effective boycott aimed at the PRC's programmatic objectives around the world.

There's no doubt that the author's proposal is radical, and to some it will appear shockingly extremist.  But if one steps back and reviews his line of reasoning, one realizes that what he suggests is not outrageously unfounded.  In a sense, all political boycotts are radical, but what they are opposed to is generally something of a truly reprehensible nature.  In the author's estimation, what the Chinese government is doing in Uyghurstan, in Tibet, in Southern Mongolia, in the Southeast Asian Sea, in Africa, and elsewhere around the world, not to mention its treatment of its own citizens, requires some sort of determined response.  He has focused on Putonghua, which he views as a tool of the CCP, one that it has aggressively pushed through the Confucius Institutes (funded with hundreds of millions of dollars) and other branches of government.  In this kind of politically charged environment, the language (Putonghua) never comes alone, but always accompanied by doctrinaire diktats on Taiwan, Tibet, "Xinjiang", "Inner Mongolia", Falun Gong, and a host of other taboo topics.