The 57-page document says that all students are required to go to mainland China once during their three years of study in the subject, and all expenses are paid by EDB. 21 trips ranging from two to five days are offered to schools.
“Study tour” is an essential tool of the united front work of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Reports of industrial and business tours to Beijing could be seen in the press on the eve of the Sino-British negotiation. One of the earliest tours for academia after the founding of communist China was organized in 1955 by Chan Kwan-Po, a professor of the Chinese Department of the University of Hong Kong, and was received by Premier Zhou Enlai.
In the 1970s, such mainland tours became popular among university students; a widely known example is that Carrie Lam, Lee Wing-tat, and Sin Chung-kai joined the same tour to Tsinghua University then. When I was an HKU student in the late 1980s, I joined tours to Beijing and Guangzhou, designed and accompanied by the Hong Kong Xinhua News Agency staff, the precursor to the Hong Kong Liaison Office.
As time goes by, the CCP’s united front work extends to the grassroots and now comes to secondary school students and is made mandatory.
Since it is mandatory and each tour will be huge as there are as many as 170 students in each grade in every school, I believe such tours will only offer standard itinerary items without any “exciting” experiences. How exciting could it have been? I was told by a friend who joined a teacher exchange tour that one night the host took all the Hong Kong teachers to a nightclub to show off the local “socialist construction achievements;” some female teacher participants could not bear such “cultural shock” and cried, but to no avail as they were requested by the school principal to respect the arrangements made by the host. In my trip to Tsinghua, we were invited to a karaoke club on campus.
Speaking of Tsinghua, why are the CSD study tour destinations confined to four provinces, namely Guangdong, Fujian, Henan and Guizhou, but not Beijing? There is nowhere more effective than going to Beijing to fulfill the superimposed tasks of “scraping the bone and treat the poison” (gua gu liao du, a Chinese metaphor for removing unpatriotic education) by gaining first-hand experience in the capital of our socialist motherland. Think about it: it takes seven hours to Guizhou by high-speed rail, and only two more hours to get to Beijing. Why not go to the best place if one has to visit anyway?
To be fair, the design of these study tours is reasonable. “Reasonable” does not mean free of brainwashing. The CSD curriculum explicitly disallows the adoption of “positive and negative dichotomy” and—as expected—emphasizes “positive value,” so the curriculum design aims to let students “think” from a single perspective. “Reasonable” means that there is no blatant insertion of communism-related stuff, except “understanding the history of the development of the CCP” under the item “Zunyi Meeting site” in the Guizhou tour, while other tours cover heritage items of the late Qing Dynasty, Republic of China, and communist China achievements.
It is interesting to note that EDB officials may not have had a full grasp of the itineraries as listed in the document. An example concerns Shamian complex in Guangzhou and Kulangsu in Xiamen. For the former, the document states that students are to “visit Shamian, which was once a British and French concession, and see the European-style architectures, through which to understand foreign encroachment in China at the time and homeland security as an indispensable part of maintaining national security.” For the latter, it merely states that students are to “appreciate the classical Chinese and Western buildings on the island and learn about their architectural features.”
As Hong Kong government now never misses a chance to talk about imperialism in the past and national security, the lack of mention about Kulangsu’s “shameful history” may imply the EDB officials” ignorance of it an international settlement, with 13 countries having their consulates there.
All media, including the leftist ones, ignored the fact that the document gives equal weight to the CSD curriculum and the national security education framework when describing every single tour. In other words, it is more proper to name them as “CSD and national security education tours.”
The about 400 secondary schools in Hong Kong will send more than forty thousand students to the mainland under the scheme each year. For such a large number of tours, no matter how strictly controlled the plan is, the unexpected may always happen, as there is a popular saying in China that “plans cannot keep up with change.” What interesting things will be waiting for them? Something like the recent Henan bank protest? Or another June Fourth Massacre?
I hope that all students can see the real communist China using their inner eyes.
