Most of cantonese speakers can speak mandarin as well.
I believe your point may be refuted by the fact that you state outright lies like this whopper here.
also, refuting one argument does not shoot down unrelated arguments.
and i'm not sure i understand you correctly, but the very first sentence in the wikipedia link says that the 1995 referendum was the second one... this [1] was the first.
Mandarin is basically the Han dialect of Chinese. The Han people are 92% of the population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese
In addition, Mandarin is the standard language used in most or all public schools. I volunteered multiple times in an area where the majority of people are the Yi minority group (location: Zhaojue in southern Sichuan). The Yi people's language doesn't even share the same characters as Chinese. When I first heard their language, I swear it sounded like it was from Africa, a lot of similar phonemes. But even there, they used Mandarin in the public schools.
>> And this isn't happening in some backwater part of the country; in addition to Cantonese being the official language of Hong Kong, Canton (a.k.a. Guangdong) is the most populous province in the country, and the location of Shenzhen itself.
Shenzhen is a city built on top of a fishing village in the 80s that had very few incumbent people. Most of the people who live in Shenzhen come from outside of Shenzhen and never spoke Cantonese. As such, they have no choice but to speak Mandarin to each other, as that's the only common language out of all the people who come from all the other provinces. The fact of the matter is that I cannot remember the last time I heard Cantonese in Shenzhen. Guangzhou has a lot of Cantonese, but that's because there were a lot of Cantonese people in Guangzhou from the beginning, as Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong (the Canton province). Shenzhen's economy is forecast to outpace Hong Kong's economy, though Hong Kong will by no means become insignificant. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-05/as-shenzh...
If Cantonese is dying, it's a natural death brought on by social and economic factors, not a forced death. Mandarin has been the standard language used in public schools since the days of the Republic of China, China's attempt at democracy, in 1912. This is not some kind of new malicious strategy brought on by the modern Communist government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Modern_Standard_Chi...
So many factors are making it a natural death for Cantonese. My Cantonese speaking friends agree with this.
Source: I live in Shenzhen
edit: formatting
Source: I grew up in Hong Kong and have relatives in mainland China
It's like me telling a Chinese person that Canadian English is basically American English, even though it isn't.
EDIT: it may well be the case that people use "Hanyu" (literally, Han language) as a synonym for "Guoyu" (lit. national language, the Taiwanese version of Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]) or "Putonghua" (lit. common speech, the PRC version of MSM). "Han language" is a poor English translation for "Hanyu" if that's what you mean.