People thought that the first Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) exam subject drawing public attention should be Liberal Studies, as it would mark the end of Liberal Studies education in Hong Kong.
No one had expected that on the very first day of the exam period, English Language would cause a big fuss, with candidates flooding to the archived Instagram of Michelle Obama, using racist language to complain about the exam question that included an extract from her memoirs and was regarded as too difficult by the candidates.
After I wrote about the Liberal Studies exam, I thought I would be sitting around to wait for the History exam that would take place on the last day of the exam period, for anomalies that were quite certain to happen. However, the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) never disappoints. Before History, another subject caused public attention.
Geography had a question about China’s weather and climate. An isobaric map of China shows a cold front north of Hong Kong. This is an ordinary question of natural geography, free of controversies or issues of political correctness. However, contrary to established practice, the HKEAA opted to politicize the question by adding the controversial nine-dash line on the map.
The nine-dash line represents China’s unilateral assertion of its national boundary in the South China Sea. Vietnam refers to it as “cow tongue,” a term that vividly describes China’s territorial claim far into its Southeast Asian region. In 2013, the Philippines applied to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague for a ruling on the legality of the nine-dashed line in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Intriguingly, during the three-year arbitration process, China repeatedly excused itself from joining by saying that it would not accept or participate in any arbitration “unilaterally initiated” by the Philippines.
However, the Convention provides that the “absence of a party or failure of a party to defend its case shall not constitute a bar to the proceedings.” Finally, in 2016, the Court resolved that “there was no evidence that China had historically exercised control over the waters of the South China Sea.”
Here, it is important to note how the Court phrased its award: “To the extent China had historic rights to resources in the waters of the South China Sea, such rights were extinguished to the extent they were incompatible with the exclusive economic zones provided for in the Convention”; “although Chinese navigators and fishermen, as well as those of the other States, had historically made use of the islands in the South China Sea, there was no evidence that China had historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or their resources.”
In other words, if we are to abide by international law, the nine-dash line is, at best controversial, if not a fake. The HKEAA always stresses that exam papers must not contain controversies. From the perspective of professionalism, including this controversial information in the exam paper does not help answer the question. This is just another piece of evidence that the HKEAA, as a professional assessment body, has been using public exams for years to assert loyalty to the communist Chinese government at the sacrifice of professionalism.
While it is shameful to use exams as a political tool, the HKEAA may have provided clues to an even bigger shame. At the bottom of the map, the legend states that the nine-dash line is China’s “nation boundary,” a term that is obviously ungrammatical. The eagle eyes of the HKEAA proofreading team, which performs its tasks way before the paper drafts are sent to the printer, could have spotted such a minor mistake in no time. The fact that the mistake remains there gives an important message: this low-level mistake might have been made way after the proofreading stage, probably one or two days before the printer deadline, in response to instructions outside the HKEAA, so urgent that another proofreading was simply impossible. In other words, this grammatical mistake can be a trace of political interference.
Whether this grammatical mistake was inadvertent or was intentional as a hint of political interference is difficult to infer.
Starting in 2020, HKEAA exams serve obvious political purposes, and people are surprised to note that sometimes such corrupted exams become oracular, with exam questions characterized by political propaganda prophesying misfortune. For example, in 2021, a question in History boasting about the “Shenzhen speed” of construction was followed by the mysterious shaking of a Shenzhen skyscraper in the same month; a question in Liberal Studies of the same year boasting about China’s energy efficiency and reliability was followed by a nationwide power outage in the summer that year. Given these “successful oracular readings” in the past, some wonder whether the isobaric map and the cold front prophesize extraordinary weather in China this summer.
