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At the heart of the current friction between Hong Kong and mainland China isn't just Hong Kong's autonomy and political freedoms. It's the territory's language. Though they share many of the same Chinese characters, Mandarin and Cantonese use them in such divergent ways-in terms of both grammar and vocabulary-that they constitute two different writing systems. China's government has tried to insist that Cantonese isn't really a language, and to suppress its use. But as with Bengali in the independence movement for Bangladesh, and the Soweto uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans in apartheid South African schools, Cantonese is beginning to take on a central role in Hong Kong's resistance to the authority of mainland China.

For more on the historical divide between Mandarin and Cantonese language speakers, see this article: http://www.chinese-lessons.com/cantonese/difficulty.htm