Consider the past 10 days. On Nov. 8, security forces killed a student protestor. Another was wounded Nov. 11. On Nov. 12, Beijing sycophants claimed mobs had brought the city to “the brink of total collapse.”
Beijing blames the U.S. and Britain for the violence. But accusing adversaries of doing what communist sympathizers and agents are actually doing was a standard Cold War Soviet and Red Chinese tactic.
Stuart Heaver (reporting from Hong Kong for The Independent) thinks Beijing is already invading. “There may be no tanks,” Heaver wrote, but many locals believe “PLA troops are already here, disguised as Hong Kong riot police …” They intend “to impose Tiananmen by stealth and create a climate of fear.”
The suspect police “are often heard speaking in Putonghua dialect,” Heaver writes. Putonghua is Mandarin (Beijing) Chinese. Most Hong Kongers speak the Cantonese dialect. Eighty-five to 95 million Chinese living along the south China coast speak Cantonese or Hakka, a related “southern” dialect.
Which leads to a linguistic connection that disturbs Beijing’s mandarins (pun intended): Seventy percent of Taiwan’s 24 million people speak Hakka.
Read the entire column.
ADDITION, THANKS TO A COMMENTER: My sources on Taiwanese dialects all said Hokkien and Hakka. Hokkien failed to make it into the column– my error. I’ve emailed my Creators editor and asked her to include it.