SHANGHAI — Thousands of years of Chinese linguistic heritage have come down to this: a squabble over Tom and Jerry.
Dubbed into regional Chinese dialects, the warring cat and mouse have been huge TV hits -- and a good way to pass home-grown culture down to the younger generation, programmers say.
Not so fast, says the central government up north in Beijing, which for decades has promoted standard Mandarin as the only Chinese language worthy of the airwaves. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television has ordered an end to broadcasting in dialect, saying kids should be raised in a "favorable linguistic environment."
The move has put Tom and Jerry -- or "Cat and Mouse," as the show is called here -- at the center of a long-running debate about how to maintain national cohesion amid a linguistic sea of highly distinct regional accents, dialects and wholly separate language groups.
"As an artist, I think dialect should be preserved as a part of local culture," said Zhang Dingguo, deputy director of the Shanghai People's Comedy Troupe, which does Tom and Jerry in Shanghainese.
"Schools don't allow Shanghainese to be spoken, and now TV doesn't either. It looks like Shanghai comedy will be dying out," he added.
The government calls the Mandarin policy vital to promoting a common Chinese identity in this vast land of 1.3 billion people, 56 ethnic groups and seven main Chinese dialects spoken by the Han ethnic majority.
"Thank you" is pronounced "xie xie" in Beijing, "do jey" in Hong Kong and "sha zha" in Shanghai. Need to know a price? Ask "wa tsui gim" in Fujian, but "duoshao qian" in Mandarin-speaking northern China.
The pronunciation of Chinese surnames can induce mild identity crisis. Mr. Xu (pronounced "shoe") in northern China becomes Mr. Ko in Fujian, which itself is called Hokkien in the local dialect.
Promotion of Mandarin -- known here as "putonghua," or "common tongue" -- began in the 1920s and became policy in 1955, six years after the communists seized power. Its use has been encouraged through an unending series of social campaigns, including the current one featuring TV presenter Wang Xiaoya on billboards exhorting Shanghainese to "speak Mandarin
In the latest campaign, Shanghai city officials are being required to attend classes on perfecting their pronunciation, schools are nominating contestants in citywide Mandarin speech contests, and foreigners are being invited to Mandarin classes.
