Read on Twitter
So normally I don't respond to random posts, but for educational purposes, I'll bite. By "literally," I presume you mean how most linguists define dialect, in which case, no it is "literally" not. It's not mutually intelligible with Mandarin, and has unique grammar and vocabulary https://twitter.com/DotardsUnite/status/1359365015787106305
But you said "dialect of Chinese," so you perhaps don't mean Mandarin. But which Chinese language do you mean? There is no ONE Chinese language, there are Chinese languages that share certain cores. Really, your claim "literally" doesn't make sense in linguistic terms
"Don't make it political." I didn't make it political-- these claims inherently just ARE. The PRC government has made very clear, in the past and now, that they insist that fangyan are "dialects" instead of languages because it supports their claims of a unified Chinese identity
And as the op-ed, and other things I have written make clear, denying the political nature of these claims erases the oppression they engender. Pretending that categorization is not political only works to bolster the power of people who already have it
If you want to know more, I wrote a whole book about it 
