Except they are not mutually unintelligible. Put someone from heilongjiang province in Sichuan and they will still be able to understand the language, albeit with more difficulty.
Though there are dialects that do have completely different pronunciation, they all use the same underlying script, save a select few minority languages. Mandarin Chinese is taught in school, but everyone still uses the local dialect to speak with each other.
I'm not even denying the CCP has ulterior motives in doing this, but your original claim was simply incorrect and disingenuous.
Wu (Shanghainese and the other related dialects of the Yangtze river delta), Yue (Cantonese), Hakka, Xiang and Min are absolutely languages. They're at least as divergent as the Romance languages or the different "dialects" of Arabic. Having a single written standard does not make the spoken varieties one language. And even if it did Cantonese has a written standard even if it's not used much, so there are at least two Chinese languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese
The relationship is similar to that between English and German or French and Italian.
Only Mandarin and Cantonese even have a fully developed way of writing with characters. Up until relatively recently Mandarin itself was considered a spoken language, until a written standard (ie correspondence of characters with the words people actually spoke) was developed. Hokkien is in the process of this now in Taiwan, they literally have a government department choosing characters for words (They started off with 900 or something, not sure where they are up to now).
Native speaker here. I have absolutely no idea where you get that.
Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you consider those different languages?
Cantonese, Hokkien and Mandarin do sound like different languages, but not all dialects are. Most Chinese speaker can understand dialects spoken in central, and north parts of China, even though they usually can't speak those dialects.
Even though some of the dialects sounds very differently, the words, syntax, sentences being used are actually the same. That's how people can read what other people speaking other dialects write, with no problem.
To complicate the issue even more, there're not one, but two writing systems currently being used: Simplified Chinese is used in China mainland and Singapore, while Traditional Chinese is used in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. That's the reason people from mainland China (no matter what dialect they speak, even Cantonese) cannot read Hong Kong newspaper fluently
The two writing systems are different but they have one to one mapping for each character. So it's also not two unrelated system.
Mandarin wasn't really written until about 120 years ago. Before people would write classical Chinese. It's a "written vernacular/白話文".
> Cantonese is just one of many dialects, and in fact, it is not a single dialect: People from different parts of Guadong province actually speak Cantonese very differently. Should you consider those different languages?
No, I'd consider them different dialects of a language called Cantonese.
> Even though some of the dialects sounds very differently, the words, syntax, sentences being used are actually the same.
Nonsense. Hokkien has a different grammar, even the personal pronouns don't match up 1:1. They're clearly in the same language family, sure, but so are English and German.
> That's the reason people from mainland China (no matter what dialect they speak, even Cantonese) cannot read Hong Kong newspaper fluently
No, it's not. I've seen Taiwanese people try and read Hong Kong newspapers, and they can't do it fluently.
When youve talked to one of them youve talked to all of them.
