I really, really doubt that. They pulled back on “patriotic education” which is honestly something a relatively large minority cared strongly about. If they tried to phase out Cantonese everyone who didn't move from the mainland would go ape. Also, Mandarin isn't even an official language, Cantonese and English are it.
Matthewrudy is right. The legislation for regulating Cantonese in broadcast and print media was enacted in Guangzhou, not Hong Kong. My mistake.
No politicians would say outright that they want to eliminate a major language, but they could drastically reduce its usage by imposing specific restrictions. And not just on spoken Cantonese, but variations of written Chinese other than the official simplified characters.
I wish I could post an original article here with more details, but for some reason even the bilingual news sites don't cover this story in English. Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Anti-Cantonese_regulations. The sources are all in Chinese (the only English link appears to be dead) but Google's translations weren't too bad.
But I believe that most Bloomberg terminal subscribers would argue that capitalist-style money accumulation (free markets, etc) is a good thing for an overall population, and that corruption-style money accumulation (which is the implication of the article) is a huge negative for a country.
But you can easily phrase it the other way and argue that corruption is good because it gives leadership an incentive to keep the capitalist system going instead of flipping back to Communism, and the cost of the payoff (a few hundred billion?) is far less than the increased welfare of the Chinese people (pulling hundreds of millions out of deep poverty).
Indeed, some have argued corruption is a good thing in general because people can buy what they want from the leadership instead of their running rampant over everything, which ameliorates any abuses: see for example Bryan Caplan http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/incorruptibly_e....
We have our own legal, visa, financial, and political system.
Although Beijing occasionally steers the political system, censorship of any kind usually ends up in protest.
I can't imagine what would happen if they tried to do censor the internet here.