Commentary
Some people in Hong Kong think that cultural issues are apolitical. Unfortunately, it is not true. The seemingly neutral treatment of Hong Kong culture in the secondary school history curriculum, for example, “the coexistence and interaction of Chinese and foreign culture,” glossed over trends such as the increasing westernization from the 1970s onwards. A landmark event was the Marriage Reform Ordinance which mandatorily introduced Western monogamy and outlawed concubinage, a Qing practice that had been there since the opening of Hong Kong.
This trend concurs with parents’ preference for English-medium schools for their kids, as proficiency in English is believed to be a prerequisite for a successful career.
However, in new Hong Kong, all these are now seen as a national security threat. The social status of the West and China in the former colony must be reversed, and the revival of the nineteenth-century mentality of “Chinese learning as substance” is of the highest priority in all government departments.
In the education sector, the replacement of Liberal Studies by brainwashing Citizenship and Social Development (CSD) as a compulsory subject and the introduction of mandatory mainland study tours are essential ideological deployments.
The first tours set off on April 3. Some of the students interviewed said they had to hand in an essay after the tour, and the question was, “How can the Greater Bay Area help the young people of Hong Kong.” This question raises even more questions.
Conceptually, Hong Kong is part of the Greater Bay Area, known as the Guangzhou-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Does the above question allow discussions on Hong Kong? If not, the question is politically incorrect at best.
Pedagogically, any question should allow objective and multi-perspective discussions, like what Liberal Studies has been doing. However, this question’s design confines an answer to a single perspective that intends to write China positively rather than objectively.
Politically, it is a secondary-school version of a “political thought report.” Communists submit such reports regularly to assure their supervisors that they align with the party line. Now, three years after the 2019 Anti-Extradition Protest, no matter how rebellious the students had been, the new CSD strives to ensure that they appreciate how loving China is to them and will duly write it down with gratefulness in their homework.
In other words, rational and critical thinking needs to give way to Chinese and communist-style stereotypes, as has been emphasized in the past. Things about the West will degenerate into an embellishment, like political cosmetics.
A good example in my mind is a leftist school in Hong Kong. Formerly known as Mongkok Workers’ Children Secondary School, it was renamed in 2018 as Scientia Secondary School to give a less proletarian and more foreign flavor, after the famous Latin quote “scientia potentia est” (knowledge is power). However, except for the school name, all the common elements of the school remain in place—the school emblem using the communist symbol of the gear wheel and the school song with lyrics such as “labor creates the world” and “workers’ children are vigorous.”
The official statement for the school’s renaming announced that its official abbreviated name is SSS. I sincerely hope that all the students will work industriously; otherwise, they and Hong Kong may be in great trouble if they miss anything in the class and reduce SSS into SS—Schutzstaffel, meaning protection squads under the Nazis.
