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from the 1984-was-not-supposed-to-be-an-instruction-manual dept.
http://mashable.com/2017/07/21/china-spyware-xinjiang/
China has ramped up surveillance measures in Xinjiang, home to much of its Muslim minority population, according to reports from Radio Free Asia.
Authorities sent out a notice over a week ago instructing citizens to install a "surveillance app" on their phones, and are conducting spot checks in the region to ensure that residents have it.
— Delinda Tien (@TienDelinda) July 14, 2017
The notice, written in Uyghur and Chinese, was sent by WeChat to residents in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital.
Android users were instructed to scan the QR code in order to install the Jingwang app that would, as authorities claimed, "automatically detect terrorist and illegal religious videos, images, e-books and electronic documents" stored in the phone. If illegal content was detected, users would be ordered to delete them.
Users who deleted, or did not install the app, would be detained for up to 10 days, according to social media users.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 06 2017, @12:15PM
There are some differences in written Cantonese vs written Mandarin but they are mostly quite similar and thus can be considered dialects of the same language.
However spoken Cantonese and spoken Mandarin are different enough that they should be considered separate languages. The mutual intelligibility of Cantonese vs Mandarin is probably lower than Spanish vs Italian.
Spoken varieties of Min Nan (e.g. Hokkien, Teochew) are even more different.