Beijinghua belongs in one city: Beijing

There is a widely-held belief that Beijing sets the benchmark for the rest of China. The capital's universities are the most prestigious, its management is supposedly superior and its businesses purportedly the most successful.

When it comes to the capital, people are blind to the views of the rest of the country. On that note, one member of advisory body the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) has put forth a proposal that the Beijing dialect be taught in kindergartens nationwide.

To foreign ears, the Beijing dialect is positively repugnant. It's a tooth-munching (assuming the speaker still has teeth - an endangered commodity in the capital) drawl that sounds like someone trying to cough-up some half-cooked chuanr (skewered meat) washed down with week-old douzhir (sour fermented soybean milk).

But their excuse, so it seems, is that the Beijing dialect is at risk of dying out, despite the fact that most native Beijingers seem to speak it and it's the lingua franca for taxi drivers. Even crosstalk and other comedy sketches are performed in the dialect.

I'm all in favor of protecting dying dialects and languages lest they go the way of Gaelic, which is taught at some Irish schools but never used in everyday conversation.

In 2010, there were protests and outcries across Guangdong Province when the government tried to eradicate Cantonese-language television programs in favor of ones in Putonghua.

Similar rumblings happened in Hong Kong last year, when parents were told that their children would receive a "mainland-style education" that wasn't up to par with their excellent English and polite Cantonese.

So what's the story? It seems it's fine to protect the Beijing dialect, as long as nobody else is allowed to speak in the fashion that they choose. In reality, it's just another case of a capital imposing its own particular brand of cultural imperialism across the entire nation.

Perhaps the capital's CPPCC members believe that people respect this city as much as they do. I hate to say it, chaps, but you're wrong. The issue of just how much the capital is respected was nicely summed up in a series of online maps that came out a couple of years ago.

There's no love lost between Beijing and the rest of the country, and every time an innocent traveler or businessman utters their gummy drawl, their fellow compatriots are most likely thinking of them as arrogant criminals.

Please, CPPCC members, consider if you want the capital's youngsters to be shunned in the same way. At the tender age of four or five, no child deserves to be spurned because they are tainted with the mark of Beijing arrogance.

Kindergartens in Guangdong teach children polished Putonghua, as they do in Shanghai, Sichuan and the rest of the country. Why should the capital get away with things that others can't?

Leave it to the families and the taxi drivers to keep the Beijing gibber alive. The last thing China needs is a country full of pirate-sounding inhabitants adding the erhuayin on words perfectly fine without it.