Speech delivered at the University of Tokyo on 21 July 2024
Patrick Poon, Visiting Researcher, University of Tokyo
I was born in 1977, during the last two decades of British colonial rule in Hong Kong. I was among the lucky ones to be among the early batch of students who enjoyed the nine-year free education. During my primary and secondary school education, we were seldom taught about Hong Kong history. What we learned from textbook would be a short paragraph about the Opium War and how Hong Kong was seized by Britain from the Qing Dynasty, the last dynasty in “Chinese” history and it was a dynasty of the Manchurians, not Han Chinese.
Like many others in Hong Kong, my mother tongue is Cantonese. We started learning English in kindergarten at the age of three. But we use Cantonese to learn all subjects, except for English lessons. Certainly, for the international schools, it would be a different story. They learn everything in English. I remember that we only started learning Mandarin at Primary 3, but we never used it in any other lessons. Only one hour each week.
We were never asked to learn anything to praise the Queen and the British royal family. We also learned a bit of British history in the subject of World History when we were in Form One. We were never taught to be patriotic. We. were never forced to do flag raising or sing the British national anthem. We were free to criticize the Hong Kong governors and the Hong Kong government’s policies, although there was no direct election of the Legislative Council until 1991, six years before Hong Kong’s handover.
To us, or at least to me, we never felt being part of the British communities nor the mainland Chinese communities. It has nothing to do about making ourselves unique or what but we just simply have very different cultures from the British and the Chinese.
However, after Hong Kong’s handover, the Hong Kong government started pushing Hong Kong students to learn Mandarin and all kinds of curriculum and activities to brainwash Hong Kong students that they are “Chinese”. However, English-medium schools were still considered by many people as elite schools with better prospect.
Before the famous Umbrella Movement in 2014, the most significant campaign led by student leaders and community leaders like Joshua Wong were about the “Anti-National Education” campaign in 2012. The Hong Kong government attempted to deepen its brainwashing national education in Hong Kong by sweepingly changing the school curriculum from kindergarten to primary and secondary school education. Many of the young student leaders like Joshua Wong and Agnes Chow became active at that time and later established the students group “Scholarism” to carry out various campaigns, including students’ strike, to boycott the Hong Kong government’s national education policy.
After the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill protests, Beijing forcibly imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong in 2020, leading to even more brainwashing national education in Hong Kong. My nephew and my niece would need to join the national flag raising team in their kindergarten. Like many of my friends’ children, they are brainwashed with national flag raising and national anthem as early as at the age of three. As Hong Kong is becoming more and more mainlandized, brainwashing national education will only become even more severe. Mandarin will be promoted, and arguably already, as more important than Cantonese. Mainland Chinese expression is presented as the “proper” expression. I have seen textbooks of primary school students that put all the examples of reorganizing sentences or comprehension with explicit brainwashing national education messages.
We are at risk of the CCP Chinese government’s attempt to dilute our Hong Kong cultures. It’s imminent. We can see traces of the CCP’s attempts trying to distort our cultures like how they have done on Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians and others.
