“Hong Kong was never a colony,” as asserted in some new Hong Kong textbooks, is as absurd as saying “the People’s Republic of China is not a country.” In order to uproot Hong Kong independence, textbooks are asked to distort history. However, history is like sedimentary rock, with sand and gravel accumulating layer by layer into hard rock; if changing a fundamental concept at the very starting point of a time line, the original historical discourse will be destroyed. Problems will arise before any benefit can be seen.
Problem 1: It concerns the core “evidence” they used–Hong Kong and Macau were removed from the list of colonies by the United Nations in 1972, which proved that Hong Kong was never a colony. Despite its absurd inference, let’s take it seriously: the fatal flaw of this inference rests on the success of the PRC, in replacing the Republic of China in the United Nations in 1971, or more precisely on the success of Albania and Algeria in pushing forward the agenda of “restoring” the “legal rights” of the PRC in the UN. This implies that had these “exogenous factors” not occurred at that time, Hong Kong would have remained a colony. Remove a name from a list and then the colonial status of a place can be rejected, retroactively effectively back to 1843 when the colony was founded—who will believe in this logic, except the “new Hongkongers?”
Problem 2: The CCP seems to not care about the discrepancy with the comments made by CCP-related historical figures. For example, in 1919, Chen Duxiu, the first CCP secretary general, said, ‘The present colonial systems by European countries, the USA and Japan, such as governors in India, governor of Hong Kong….“ Zhou Youguang, ”father of pinyin,“ recalled his return to China after the Second World War, ”We got plane tickets at England and flew all the way to Hong Kong. All the places we passed were important British colonies, and Hong Kong was also a British colony.”
The most interesting materials certainly come from the CCP itself. For example, in the Canton-Hong Kong General Strike and Boycott (1925-26) in which the CCP actively participated, the CCP Central Committee wrote, “To striking workers in Canton and Hong Kong” that, “Hong Kong was originally a Chinese territory, but was ceded to Britain because of the Opium War.” It is not difficult to infer from the word “originally” that the CCP considered Hong Kong, a British territory.
Problem 3: The distorted history contradicts the current historical view of the CCP. In its historical framework, the CCP divides territories according to the degree of loss of sovereignty: sovereign state (with full sovereignty), colony (with complete loss of sovereignty), and “semi-colony” (formally independent and autonomous, but economically and politically dependent on imperialist powers). The concept of “semi-colony” was invented by Lenin and first appeared in 1916 in “Imperialism is the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” (in which China, Turkey and Persia were classified as “semi-colonial” countries). As a disciple of Marxism-Leninism, the CCP naturally had to hold it high, and later coined the phrase,“semi-colonial and semi-feudal,” to describe the nature of China’s modern history from 1840-1949.
The logic of this historical discourse, before the distortion takes place, is consistent: Hong Kong was “originally” a Chinese territory, and unequal treaties made it a colony, with sovereignty given to Britain, whereas China maintained formal independence but was exploited by the imperialist states, hence the numerous approaches and theories to save China. In the end, the Chinese Communist Party became the savior to liberate China and eventually unify it with Hong Kong and Macao.
Does the Hong Kong government know that it will cause serious consequence by overturning a century-long consensus among the Chinese that the Treaty of Nanjing deprived China of its sovereignty over Hong Kong? “Never a colony” implies that starting from the mid-nineteenth century Hong Kong’s political status had been higher than that of “semi-colonial” by China for a whole century; “China has always had sovereignty over Hong Kong,” as we all know is factually untrue, is actually an accusation to successive governments (at least 1843-1949), that they never actively claimed sovereignty over Hong Kong, and acted as if Hong Kong had been de facto given up. Does the new historical discourse suggest that Hong Kong had in fact enjoyed some kind of independent status for more than a century?
History forms a system in which everything is intertwined. Distorting a piece of history–especially a fundamental one—will result in an endless ocean of facts falsifying the wrong history.
