Local people's sense of place identity might feel threatened in the midst of rapid social change or at a time of crisis, they come into collective consciousness and are particularly likely to assert and highlight their local place identity. Languages (including scripts) become one way for them to maintain an authentic claim to a place and give it a social meaning that in turn authenticates their status as ‘true’ residents of this place. The use of a simplified Chinese sign by McDonald's in Macao in May 2012 has sparked a debate on the protection of traditional Chinese characters against simplified Chinese characters. With the application of the ideology of linguistic authenticity to netizens' comments, this study reveals the sociolinguistic imagination of a homogeneous Macao speech community and illustrates how Macao people discursively negotiate and construct their identities under the tension of ‘One Country’ and ‘Two Systems’. It also discusses some of the contextualizing factors that help situate the debate in a broader sociopolitical context. Small as it is, Macao serves as an illustration of the ways in which local–national tensions play out in languages and has wider resonance beyond the site under investigation.
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