On July 7, 2022, the 85th anniversary of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Education Bureau (EDB) announced mandatory study tours to mainland China for students studying Citizenship and Social Development, which aims at nurturing patriotism. Students will join one of the 21 2 to 5-day itineraries, all paid for by the Bureau. After resuming cross-border travel with the mainland earlier this year, the EDB was actively finalizing the details. However, the announcement on Feb. 9 made even the leftists wince, as the finalized 22 itineraries are only 1 to 3-day tours to Guangdong, just bordering Hong Kong, eight of which are only one day. All the longer trips to more distant provinces such as Fujian, Hunan, and Guizhou are unavailable.
While many locals join one-day tours to Hong Kong’s Lantau Island to see the world-renowned bronze Buddha statue and have vegetarian lunch in the temple, what can one-day study tours achieve after the long hours of cross-border travel? Probably hasty visits to one or two museums. Even Wong Kam-leung, who belongs to the same pro-China education federation as Christine Choi Yuk-lin, the current secretary for education, criticized that such trips are too hasty and not very useful for students to understand China better.
A serious study tour should be long enough for personal contact and interaction to discover facts and experiences previously unknown to the participants. They should not be designed purely for the passive reception of information. China’s modern history has a lot of examples of such tours. The Republican period focused on construction, attracting interested foreigners and overseas Chinese to come to study, and it was not unusual for such trips last for weeks.
After the founding of the PRC, targets of United Front Work in Hong Kong were invited to have extended study tours, and such stories might even catch a headline. One example was Chan Kwan-po, Hong Kong University Chinese Language lecturer, who spent 16 days in Beijing in December 1955, visiting all places open to overseas Chinese. Premier Zhou Enlai even received him. He spoke very positively about communist China every time he spoke to the media after returning to Hong Kong. “The cooperative doubled its production last year and will install a telephone this year; the village will have electric lighting in 1958, showing that the peasants’ lives are getting better every day,” he said.
Ta Kung Pao, a leftist newspaper in Hong Kong, ran quite some stories on his tour. When talking about China’s progress under the rule of the communists, he reportedly commented that some people would like Chinese peasants to plow their fields with oxen forever. He criticized their intention as the same as some who insisted that the “Japanese warlords” had never beaten a single Chinese though everyone knew that Chinese workers fell victim to such violence during the Japanese occupation. Chan’s ability to relate current politics to the national shame of the Japanese invasion is an admirable talent that the EDB intends to nurture through the new brainwashing subject of Citizenship and Social Development.
Sixteen days is obviously too long for students, but cutting it down to one day is unimaginable even to those who promoted “accelerated education” in the late Qing, such as requesting Japan’s University of Law and Politics to compress the six-year curriculum into one year for Chinese students.
Another story about Chan is also thought-provoking. In 1956, he and his leftist group, the Chinese Reform Club, requested the Hong Kong government to lift restrictions on the entry of Chinese people, which had been there since the communist takeover, to prevent waves of illegal immigrants. He said, “the Chinese people living in the mainland now are leading a very stable life. Their living standard is rising. Hong Kong is neither a paradise nor a gold mine, so why do they come to Hong Kong? It is certain to say that the vast majority of Chinese people coming to Hong Kong from the mainland will be for transit, visiting relatives, or business. They will only stay temporarily, and lifting the restrictions will not lead to abrupt population rise.” His prophecy turned out to be opposite: the subsequent Anti-Rightist Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the three-year famine led to a mass exodus to Hong Kong, with more than two million from Guangdong alone.
This shows that study tours, no matter how long, do not necessarily enhance knowledge of China.
Today, the internet and social media provide an insurmountable amount of information for people to learn about the real China. EDB’s mainland study tour planning is equivalent to the government’s light public housing scheme with flats intended for five years of use only, which is way too costly and ineffective. In my opinion, as such tours are overwhelmed with red lines and students are not supposed to exchange their views with their mainland counterparts on issues such as democracy, freedom, and universal values, students may better stay home, do some required readings, and save time and fuel.
