This interview is with Pang Laikwan, author of “Language as Movement: A Short History of the Cantophone, 1840s–1920s” in the October 2026 issue of Twentieth-Century China. Pang Laikwan is Choh-Ming Li Professor of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Before we start discussing your article, could you tell us a bit about your academic background?
After earning my PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, I returned to Hong Kong, my hometown. I am currently a faculty member at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My scholarship is highly driven by my curiosity and my passion at the time, thus my relatively unfocused scholarly track.
Your article examines the world travels of Cantonese speakers in the late Qing and early Republican periods. How did you come to research this fascinating topic?
Cantonese is a very important component of Hong Kong identity, and many in Hong Kong are deeply anxious about the slow decline of Cantonese to Putonghua. Obviously, I have strong attachment to Cantonese, but I think this anxiety should be more widely shared, as China, supposedly one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, is losing its regional languages very rapidly. I don’t have any concrete data at hand, but it is clear that more and more young people in China speak only Putonghua, and the fossilization of the many regional languages is a cultural disaster. Of course, the case of Hong Kong is very complicated, with cultural, political, and economic factors interplaying. But instead of giving such an account, which I do not find too enlightening, I chose to go back to history and explore the vigor and vitality of this language in China’s recent history. The purpose is not to claim its exceptionalism but explore how this language, like many others, travels, connects, and morphs. Maybe we should have faith in this highly energetic language, which will continue to unfold in surprising ways.
You offer both a social and cultural history. How do these two fields offer different lenses to understand the transformation of Cantonese language and speakers around the start of the twentieth century?
Indeed, I am studying a language, but I do not use a linguistic perspective, largely because I do not have the training and capacity. This article is primarily a social history, because I follow the Cantonese speakers and see where they went and how they interacted with other speakers. But I am also a cultural studies scholar, and inevitably I approach this history with a critical and theoretical lens. In this article I do try my best to tell a story instead of giving a criticism. I hope that this story is interesting enough to allow different people to approach it with their own insights.
How does the story of Cantonese travel within China contrast with international travel?
There is an obvious link between the influence and integrity of the traveling language and the economic strength of the region the traveling speakers originally came from. The Pearl River Delta area is one of the most affluent places in China historically, and not surprisingly Cantonese was able to remain relatively unscathed and even became hegemonic in some Guangxi regions, for example. But in Shanghai the story seems to be quite different, as the Cantonese speakers there wanted to be unobtrusive and not too visible in their new abode. Overseas, the ways the Cantonese speakers wanted to, or were forced to, interact with other Chinese speakers and the local people also mattered a lot, in addition to their skills and capital. I think this history shows that language has its own life too, and there are so many factors that determine how it develops, grows, and dies.
How does your history of Cantonese speakers in Japan fit into the greater history of the revolutionary period?
While the importance of the study-abroad Chinese students in Japan is widely acknowledged, most of the previous scholarships considered these students as a culturally unified group. But they were not: not only did they speak different topolects/dialects with different cultural identifications, but they were also informed by a democratic idealism valuing all regions as relatively equal. They were very conscious of the regional differences of China as an enormous country. I think they were far more aware of China’s cultural pluralism than today’s Chinese foreign students are. I also think that their experiences in Japan influenced their politics a lot: consider how the Xinhai Revolution began with the independence of different provinces, and the development thereafter of the “local self-rule” movement. I discussed the movement in my One and All book from a political perspective. Here in this article, I tried a cultural/linguistic perspective to look at it.
Throughout the article you discuss conceptions of Cantonese identity: how do your conclusions on identity complicate or contrast with other studies?
Like all real politics, both the ethics and emotions involved in identity politics are fraught. To those who are non-Cantonese speakers, I want to say that the anxiety is real, that the Hong Kong people, as well as many other native Cantonese speakers in different parts of the world, are worried that our language will become a cultural heritage instead of a living language, which seems to be almost fated considering the current political-economic situations. But my real concern is probably the Hong Kong people, and I want to remind ourselves that there are so many things not up to us to determine. We do what we can, and leave the rest to the language itself, which has its own life.
How would you relate the broader conclusions of your study to other fields such as linguistics and diasporic studies?
I have discussed my concerns with a linguist colleague, and she reminds me that while it is true that many regional languages are shrinking rapidly in China, most of them have not disappeared yet, as there are still some people able to speak them, which allows the linguists to preserve them. I am obviously very sad about it. When we try to preserve a language, the language is no longer evolving, and it is basically dead. Cantonese is such a powerful language partly because it has been constantly traveling and morphing in its own unpredictable ways.
Yes, this work is basically a diasporic study with a linguistic twist. But this work, I hope, also shows that languages are not entirely the same as their speakers, and a study of the movement of the language would allow us to observe a “materialist” side of the cultural-social history. We do not always own our language, but sometimes language possesses us.
Can you give us a bit of background on this project? Is it part of a wider research project?
The is a standalone article, and I wrote it simply because I shared a common concern with many others about the future of Cantonese. As I cannot see the future, I can only go back to its history, and this history is indeed revealing. I also want to make sure I do not treat Cantonese as exceptional: particularity and universality are always at play in my other research in complex ways. Currently I am working on two completely different research projects, one on state security laws and the other on late Qing intellectual history. This article is related to my second research in tangential, but also important, ways. Thinking is so heavily conditioned by language. We have often forgotten that other than our so-to-speak unified written Chinese we have a wide set of extremely diversified spoken languages. There are so few historical records related to the linguistic practices of the Chinese intellectual figures. But this awareness, I think, is important for us to study China’s intellectual history. Of course we cannot overemphasize their regional identities. But we cannot just assume these figures share a common language and a common culture.
In what ways would you like your research to change the field of Chinese history as a whole?
Wow, this is such a big question. I usually do not have grand views about field directions, partly because academia is so much influenced by trends, which might not be a good thing. Instead of projecting another vision, I hope to see room for each of us to do what we are interested in—usually those works are the most touching ones. I am also weak in methodology; I can only say I am more a spontaneous thinker than a scrupulous scholar.
Where do you see your research going in the future?
As I said, this is a standalone article, and I do not have any plans to develop it in any concrete ways. My other projects are developing in different directions, one in the philosophy of law and the other intellectual history. I don’t know where they will end up, and that’s the fun part of scholarship.
What historiography shaped this project? For further reading, what historiography would you recommend?
Can I suggest something entirely unrelated, which is Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution? It has nothing to do with Chinese language, but its concerns have shaped a good part of my thinking these days. Bergson argues that life evolves not through natural selection or strict mechanical rules but via a continuous, unpredictable flow of novelty driven by an internal life force called the élan vital. I just taught the book in my graduate seminar, and to my pleasant surprise many of my students like the book too.
Do you have any closing comments for our readers?
Haha, love your mother tongue, and be empathetic to those who do not share yours.