It involves more than linguistic characteristics to distinguish language from dialect. One can argue for both cases. I personally prefer to think of Chinese as

It involves more than linguistic characteristics to distinguish language from dialect. One can argue for both cases. I personally prefer to think of Chinese as a language family. It would be a much larger, and very interesting, topic. For the discussion on this thread, I use "dialect" other than "separate languages", since Cantonese, We Chinese, etc. are described as dialects in most materials I read.