The Education Bureau of Hong Kong (EDB) recently explained in an online article why Hong Kong had not been a British colony from historical and legal perspectives. The article has nothing new, as it merely repeats political correctness by distorting basic historical facts.
I started to expose EDB’s attempts to distort history in 2004 when I wrote an article in Ming Pao to discuss the official textbook guidelines published in 1998. A week after its publication, a Ming Pao editor wrote that the bureau had prepared the line-to-take for the Secretary for Education Arthur Li Kwok-cheung in case reporters raised a question.
In 2004 the government restrained from responding proactively, knowing its lack of justification, now, they write a 1,500-word article to tell the public how to “correctly understand the historical facts of Hong Kong,” thanks to the National Security Law.
To the communists, history education is a battlefield they must never lose. My pro-establishment friends told me that their meetings on education with the Liaison Office always discuss three subjects, namely History, Liberal Studies, and the Chinese Language.
The communists always think that correct history is far more important than true history.
In constructing “political correctness,” besides directly rewriting history, it is common to resort to semantic manipulation, using specific phrasing so that people will perceive given messages uncritically. Here is a common but not always obvious example: New China, is now regarded as a synonym for Communist China.
The terms “new” and “old” describe how long something has come into being and were originally neutral in meaning. Long before 1949, people had been using the term new China, such as in the 1910 novel “New China” by Lu Shiyi, which is a fantasy of the future modernization of China.
However, as revolution became part of Chinese life, “new China” was given political connotations: on occasions such as after the 1911 revolution, the Northern Expedition, and the Sino-Japanese War, people used “new China” to embrace the new political future. Only after the founding of Communist China was the term monopolized by the communists and became synonymous with the “progressive, selfless and united China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).”
Naturally, we have “old China” to contrast with the new one. To glorify the communist achievements, all the “new Chinas” before the CCP had to become part of “old China” to construct the historical narrative of “ceding land and paying indemnities, abandoning sovereignty and humiliating the nation” and ultimately fulfilling the “historical destiny” of the CCP’s liberation of China.
However, to many historians, this narrative is biased as they believe “old China,” especially in the republican period, was a golden period of development.
Frank Dikötter, in his book “The Age of Openness,” points out that in China before Mao, “the period 1900 to 1949 was characterized by engagement with the world at all levels of society.
The pursuit of openness was particularly evident in four areas, namely: in governance and the advance of the rule of law and of newly acquired liberties; in freedom of movement in and out of the country; in open minds thriving on ideas from the humanities and sciences; and in open markets and sustained growth in the economy.” The communists also profited from this open environment to advance and replace the Kuomintang as the ruling party in mainland China.
It is worth noting that there are two Chinese characters for “old:” lao (老) has the flavor of respect and nostalgia, such as lao friends and lao Hong Kong, whereas jiu (舊) denotes something that may be discarded (such as ‘breaking up the old to establish the new, pojiu lixin).
Therefore, the communist understanding of the Republican Period “new democracy revolution” which took place before 1949, although having some communist involvement, was led by bourgeois revolutionaries such as Sun Yat-sen, is jiu China, not lao China. Using the word jiu means that such things should be discarded, denounced, and replaced by the “new China” of communism.
Dikötter also notes that the CCP denounced the local autonomy movement of the republican period as a warlord fiefdom. He points out that such an autonomy movement was not conceptually related to nation and nationalism; it is “a-nationalistic.” The communists denounce autonomy movements in history (such as Chen Jiongming’s “confederation of autonomous provinces,” liansheng zizhi), and they naturally will denounce autonomy that they cannot control under “one country, two systems.” This explains the importance of history to Hong Kong society and why the Hong Kong government needs to rewrite it to meet communist requirements.
