Cantonese nationalism
In the year 1911, the Xinhai Revolution begun at the end of October, Cantonese members of the Tongmenghui, including Chen Jiongming, Deng Keng, and Peng Ruihai, organized troops in various parts of Guangdong to launch an uprising.
However, this proposal for the future planning of Guangdong Province did not receive sufficient support and was aborted due to the intervention of the Soviet Union in the Far East and the Northern Expedition of the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party.
At this time, the southeastern provinces resisted the imperial court's foreign policy and signed treaties with western countries on their own, effectively becoming political entities separated from the control of the Qing government.
He proposed suggestions to China Daily (Hong Kong) [zh] President Chen Shaobai and advocated that revolutionaries should cooperate with Li Hongzhang, the Viceroy of Guangdong, to save the country.
On June 11, Sun Yat-sen, Yang Quyun, Zheng Shiliang [zh], Miyazaki Torazo and others set out from Yokohama and arrived at the sea of Hong Kong on the 17th, where they met the warship sent by Li Hongzhang to greet him.
The article spanned around fifty to sixty thousand Chinese characters and was published over several dozen days, advocating for the necessity of Canton independence and separation from the Qing Dynasty, receiving a warm welcome from readers.
Au Ku-kap believes that "those who speak of self-reliance among the Chinese take Taiwan as the starting point," and considers publications like the Hunan Daily (1898) [zh] founded by Tan Sitong and Tang Caichang as "the beginning of the voice for independence of various provinces in China."
[28][29] On May 8, 1905, the Qing Dynasty's Grand Council sent letters to provincial governors ordering the strict prohibition of "rebellious" publications including "New Canton", "New Hunan", and "Xinmin Congbao", which all advocated for reform or revolution.
He is a man who would cunningly change his stance", "plotting unrest, mobilizing forces in the three provinces of Guangdong, Yunnan, and Guizhou, and purchasing weapons and ammunition which cannot be achieved without raising tens of thousands of funds through stock offerings", "plotting to seize power", "using the power of the governor to coerce merchants and seize their assets, making use of Guangxi's remote location for planning unrest, and intending to establish independence in Guangxi, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Guizhou".
[42] Dissident historian Liu Zhongjing believes that if the practice of inter-provincial autonomous constitutionalism had not been interfered with by the Northern Expedition of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, it would eventually have slowly eroded the power of the central government of the Republic of China.
[43] In 2015, China's National Development and Reform Commission included Guangzhou, Huizhou, Dongguan and Shenzhen Guangming New District in Guangdong Province as part of a pilot project to improve the welfare of migrants at an estimated cost of 149 billion Chinese Yuan, a move that sparked a war of words on the Internet.
In Hong Kong Police Force's operational guidelines for the law, examples of behavior endangering national security were mentioned, including demonstrators waving designated flags.
[57] On January 5, 2023, Wong Jeun-git, a man who worked as a courier in Hong Kong, was sentenced at the West Kowloon Magistrates' Court for content he posted on multiple social media in early 2021.
In his judgment, Chief Magistrate Victor So Wai-tak, designated judge under the Hong Kong National Security Law, held that the defendant not only shared other people's information, but also personally produced and wrote the content.
The content promoted local independence in the mainland, split the country, and advocated the use of force to carry out "revolution", "uprising" and "war", it was believed that the defendant's remarks clearly threatened public safety.
Participants include supporters of the independence movements in Hong Kong, East Turkestan, Southern Mongolia, Guangdong and other places, as well as pro-democracy activists in the People's Republic of China.
The speaker believed that Hong Kong was once the "West Berlin of East Asia" and had sheltered many refugees fleeing the totalitarian power of the Chinese Communist Party, which also provided him with political enlightenment.
In November 2023, when Xi Jinping attended the APEC summit in the United States and visited California, protesters against China staged demonstrations at locations such as the Chinese Consulate General in San Francisco.
A week later, the court issued a written judgment, ruling that based on the evidence and Yeung's lack of objection to the charges, his actions constituted the crime of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, sentencing him to nine months in prison, until May 25, 2020.
However, he believes that in addition to opposing Xi Jinping and the CCP, there should be fundamental opposition to China's "Grand Unification", because "this system does not respect the interests and history of people's homelands... it only perpetuates tragedy."
Fearing attention from the Chinese Communist Party's national security departments, he ultimately decided to escape from China through "underground" means, traveling overland from the South American country of Ecuador and finally arriving in the United States in July.
"[108][109] In his 1999 military novel "Chinese Canton Army Uprising," Japanese right-wing writer Masahiro Miyazaki envisioned the plot of the division of South China amid Sino-Japanese conflicts.
In his military novel The New Japan-China War published from 1995 to 2003, Mori created a fictional plot in which China's internal power struggle led to regional conflicts after the death of Deng Xiaoping.
Chinese dissident writer Wang Lixiong's novel The Yellow Peril depicts the independence of the southeastern coastal provinces, including Guangdong, from Beijing in order to protect their own interests as a result of the internal power struggle in the People's Republic of China.
Tam reiterated Chen Jiongming's concept of provincial autonomy and argued that from a geographical point of view, Guangdong could be independent as long as the three mountain passes bordering Fujian and Hunan and the waterway in Zhaoqing were closed.
[141] On October 16, 2023, the Foshan Civil Affairs Bureau (People's Republic of China) [zh] announced the banning of an organization called "Lingnan Model United Nations" because it "conducts debate training on sensitive issues."
[151] Regarding Wong's views, Huang Yicheng, an exiled social activist who participated in the White Paper movement in Shanghai, believes that independence based on provinces is impossible because "China's provincial boundaries and cultural geography units are staggered."
The author, George Bronson Rea, argued that the foreign powers should recognize Manchukuo and that the Chinese nation is not a unified entity; in the article, he stated that the unity of China would bring disaster and opportunities for the expansion of Soviet influence.
If the recognition of Canton as a sovereign state will be the means of putting a stop, even a temporary one, to these insensate internecine wars, humanity, common-sense and practical politics demands action along these lines.
After the 2020–2021 China–India skirmishes, some Indian media, including the famous news channel NewsX, circulated and displayed maps of China after its disintegration, in which Canton was often split into its own country named "Cantonia".
