Realistically speaking, it is in China’s long-term interest to have everybody speaking the same language.
Not at the expense of wiping put an entire cultural and thousands of years of it shistory, which is the real goal here.
Article doesn’t make clear if Mandarin & Cantonese are separate LANGUAGES — if one is a dialect, then which is the authentic language and which is the dialect? For example, there are regions of Italy that have dialects of Italian — but in Spain, Catalan is a separate LANGUAGE, not a dialect of Spanish. So is Basque.