The hunger strike protest in Hong Kong over the implementation of the government’s ”national education” scheme has now received its due share in the international news coverage. From the BBC and the Daily Telegraph of London, to Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, from Le nouvel Observateur (France; in French) and the Liechtensteiner Vaterland (Liechtenstein; in German), to Terra Argentina (Argentina; in Spanish) and the Indian Express (Indian; in English),we see coverage all across the globe in matter of a couple of days. I personally hope that this international news coverage would make the HK and Chinese governments refrain from using police (or even military) force to remove the protesters from the government square.
Nevertheless, I would like to address an error in New York Times’ report of the protest. The article ‘Plan for ‘National Education’ Stirs Protests in Hong Kong’ by Keith Bradsher (with contributions from Hilda Wang) on September 3, states that,
Under British rule, Chinese history courses in Hong Kong stopped with the events of the early 1800s. That was conveniently before the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 1860s, in which Britain seized the core pieces of what is now Hong Kong in retaliation for Chinese restrictions on imports of opium.
This statement is utterly untrue. I received my elementary and high school education in Hong Kong in the last decade of British rule. Our Chinese history classes in junior high school (i.e. age 13-15) covered from ancient China down to the early 1980s when Deng Xiaoping re-opened China to the world. For people one generation earlier, i.e. those educated in the 1970s, they had to study Chinese history up to the Second World War. For people in my parents’ generation, who received their elementary and high school education in the 1950s and 60s, their Chinese history class covered up to the 1911 revolution that overthrew Qing Dynasty and the establishment of the Republic. We all had to learn about the Opium Wars.
How can such a serious factual error creep into a report of such a prestigious newspaper that is respected across the globe? Can anyone tell the New York Times that they are wrong?
The New York Times report implicitly left behind an image of citizens of Hong Kong who are uninformed of China’s modern history and are reluctant to learn about China’s recent past. And this is the exact opposite of reality. The Chinese history education offered in Hong Kong is far more balanced than that offered in mainland China. It is because we cherish our history education, that we cannot allow our government to change our curriculum such that only events that glorify the present regime are taught.
Furthermore, to write that the proposed “national education” as simply ”courses in contemporary Chinese history”, the New York Times grossed over the very substance of the proposed scheme. This is not a history course, but lectures on politics. The Chinese Communist Party had for long used a distorted version of modern Chinese history to mis-inform students in the mainland, to justify the very existence of their regime. “Without Communists, you would not have a New China,” so their slogan went. It is a sensitized version of Chinese history and Chinese politics that is being introduced into Hong Kong primary school systems.
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The Hong Kong Government requested the students, not only to learn the facts and theories about Chinese politics and history, but to “emotionally” attach to the “Fatherland”. Students had to be evaluated by their display of patriotic passion. How could “patriotic passion” be evaluated in a culture that placed so much emphasis on academic success, without encouraging students to fake their emotions and passion in order to get a pass in their “patriotic passion”?
Moreover, participation (nor refusal of participation) of “nationalist education” activities of each student will have to be input by teachers into a computer system that is monitored by the Education Bureau. Hong Kong is moving one step further towards becoming a police state.
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In the final section of the NY Times report, Keith Bradsher argues that this event has to be set against a broader context, which is the linguistic divide between Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong and Mandarin-speaking mainland China. Whilst this is certainly part of the source of tension between Hong Kong and the mainland. this is not the major factor that contributes towards this protest.
The key issue is to maintain Hong Kong’s autonomy overs its internal affairs, that include educational policy, to reject the legitimacy of Beijing’s version of a one-party-state China over our version of a (future) China that embraces liberty and democracy (in the form of multi-party parliamentary democracy), and to maintain our academic freedom so that our teachers can freely teach their students what is true from what is false.
Can you imagine that if you were a primary school teacher, you were forced by your education bureau official to teach your school kids that the Communist Party is a ruling party that shows “solidarity, progressiveness and unselfishness”? Can you imagine that you have to teach the glories and achievements of the Communist Party whilst you have to ignore the Cultural Revolution as if it had never happen?
This is why we have to protest against this government’s scheme which force our teachers to teach their students what they believe to be false and wrong. This is a matter of freedom of conscience.
We hope that our international friends will be sympathetic to our struggle for our freedom.
(Source: Wikipedia)
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