中华九大州
The Atlantic has an interesting feature about the ‘Nine Nations of China.’ These sorts of cultural delineations are problematic; “the people on the other side of this here imaginary line eat baozi for breakfast, we prefer rice-porridge” type distinctions are difficult to come by. The regions chosen aren’t actually very different from Sinitic language maps; though obviously there’s going to be a lot of overlap within culture and language. Language as a measure of certain kinds of diversity seems more defensible since there is some distinction about what people are speaking at point A v. point B. This is even more significant given the complete lack of homogeneity within the Chinese language family: they call Cantonese, Hakka, Wu… dialects, but they are about as close to Mandarin as English is to Swedish, French, and Esperanto. As such, language seems to be a fairly important facet of regional identity among mainlanders.
It’s useful to think conceptually of the wealthier Chinese provinces as a coastal archipelago, given extensive economic inequality in China today; those provinces with GDP per capita greater than Rmb30,000 (~USD4,200) are shown above (note: Inner Mongolia fits the criteria, but has a very small total population, and is resource rich, pushing up the average per-capita measure). This entire area has a total population of approximately 500 million, and also happens to be the region with the most linguistic (and therefore cultural-regional?) diversity. The bias becomes more significant the higher the threshold; the image below depicts provinces with average GDP > Rmb35,000 GDP / capita:
The pseudo-Mandarin speaking, Han dominated heartland is still relatively poor (income at approximately Rmb2,500 per capita annually). The rural-urban, north-south wealth divide is also strongly correlated with linguistic differences, at least broadly speaking (there’s considerable geographic overlap in both measures). This phenomena could to some extent explain the vigor behind the ‘one nation 5000 years!’ narrative. The areas that are most capable of conducting their own affairs might have the most reason/motivation to (“what do those socialist bumpkins up north know anyway?”) Indeed, the wealthiest and one of the most diverse areas (Ta|wan) is already a separate country中国组成的一个部分. Repeating that last line (“Taiwan is a part of China Taiwan is a part of China”) is important: history furnishes plenty of examples of national division over less significant fault lines as language or regional identity, in places with wealth gaps much less extensive than those that exist today in the PRC.
Cultural identity is necessarily subjective, and these maps (via Shanghaiist) are probably at least as revealing than my econo-linguistic examination up there. They also happen to be hilarious.
Interesting post! I like the maps. When I was in 随州, people told me that they can’t understand 武汉话, and there was a guy attending the wedding who was from the northeast who said that he basically can’t understand a word of 随州话… and that’s languages that are all supposed to be dialects of Mandarin.
I wonder if maybe having one official language that everyone has to learn (i.e. 普通话) allows for greater diversity in local languages. In Europe for examples, there are maybe 20 or so different languages that each have official status in a region that’s more or less the size of a Chinese province, so everyone in that region learns a fairly uniform version of that language and can communicate with other people from that region (Swedes from southern Sweden have no problem understanding Swedes from northern Sweden, even though the geographic distance between them is pretty big). In China, the regional language generally isn’t taught in schools or spoken on TV, but it’s still firmly enough rooted to be people’s first language, so then there’s more splintering, and each town speaks their own version — to the point where two cities in Hubei province apparently can’t understand each others’ dialects. Maybe if there had instead been something like a nine-language policy, the versions of those nine language that people speak would have been much more uniform?
[...] romanizations for several place names (Lohkatsy, Zaanhai) rather than a standard Mandarin Pinyin. Linguistic regionalism is supported by design firms? Some might respond that an expanded metro system is wishful thinking. Nonsense – more [...]