The recent suggestion of using Mandarin instead of Cantonese on the city's TV news programs has been strongly opposed by local residents.

The proposal delivered at Monday's meeting of the city's political consultative conference advised Guangzhou TV to broadcast its news programs in Mandarin on the News Channel and Channel One.

The proposal, if adopted, would reduce the amount of broadcasting time in Cantonese, a dialect spoken in and around the city of Guangzhou, by the majority of the population in Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the lingua franca of Guangdong province, the eastern part of the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region and some neighboring areas.

The proposal is "to help the visitors during the Asian Games, which open in November", said Ji Keguang, a member of the conference committee.

However, a poll on the official website of the city's political consultative conference shows that 80 percent of the 30,000 respondents disagreed with the proposal.

The committee explained that the proposal would also enable Guangzhou's TV to broadcast its programs to the whole nation via satellite.

Four of the five biggest cities in China - Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Tianjin - have all broadcast their TV programs nationally via satellite, with Guangzhou being the exception, Ji said.

In the survey, 79.5 percent said they would like to see the programs in Cantonese and the rest said they want to hear Mandarin on the prime-time news programs.

"Guangzhou TV always sticks to dual language broadcasting," said Zeng Zhi, director of the editors' office at the station. "We serve two audiences who speak either Mandarin or Cantonese and do not intend to abandon either of them."

(China Daily July 8, 2010)