alt Hacker News> Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)
This is enough to discredit the whole infographic in my eyes. No matter what the CPC or anybody else may claim, these are distinct languages, and not dialects. Not only that, but in some of these places a lot of Chinese speak other regional Chinese languages, such as Fuzhounese, rather than Mandarin or Cantonese. (I remember a blog from twenty or so years ago by a NYC Chinatown native who mapped his building by language; something like a dozen Chinese languages were spoken by residents of that building's apartments.)
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While I land on agreeing that finer language data should be collected anonymously, I think you may be too quick to view the motivations through a modern geopolitical lens. Historically Chinese American have had bigger domestic issues than this. Just a decade ago, Asian Americans in Massachusetts protested bill H3361 out of fear that finer census data would be used improperly.
the point is to give an idea of the approximate region that people come from, not to give a professionally accurate linguistic picture
The thing you're complaining about doesn't even mention the word "dialect" and it says underneath: "Some Census categories combine multiple languages or language groups". So they're probably just doing the best they can with the data that is available to them.
I think you're right that Cantonese should be (and usually is) referred to as a "language" but the categories "dialect" and "language" are not mutually exclusive. For example, Dutch is both a language (for most purposes) and a dialect of West Continental Germanic (for some linguistic purposes).