[Through new lesson plans and
expensive publishing projects, the government hopes to teach future generations
a curated lesson about the city’s past.]
By Vivian Wang
But the goal was only partially to
nurture an interest in the past. The central aim of the new curriculum
guidelines, unveiled by the Hong Kong government this month, was much more
ambitious: to use those historical stories to instill in the city’s youngest
residents a deep-rooted affinity for mainland China — and, with it, an
unwavering loyalty to its leaders and their strong-arm tactics.
Students, the guidelines said, should develop “a sense of belonging
to the country, an affection for the Chinese people, a sense of national
identity, as well as an awareness of and a sense of responsibility for
safeguarding national security.”
The Chinese government, in its
efforts to quash
dissent, has imposed a strict set of restrictions on Hong Kong, including
new rules this week to bar
any candidates deemed disloyal to the Community Party from elected
office.
But the strategy goes well beyond
repression. The Hong Kong government has also launched a vast campaign to
indoctrinate the next generation — and it is using history as a potentially
powerful tool to inculcate obedience and patriotism.
When mass antigovernment protests
swept the city in 2019, pro-Beijing officials blamed the education system for
promoting liberal values and radicalizing Hong Kong. Determined to avoid a
repeat, they are now aggressively promoting a specific narrative, designed to
reinforce the Chinese Communist Party’s tightening rule over the former British
colony.
To the authorities, that narrative
is a necessary corrective to ensure stability and unity. To the critics, it is
social engineering, a misleading and dystopian campaign to shape young minds.
In some cases, the government has
moved to literally rewrite history. It is backing the creation of a 66-volume
set of “Hong Kong Chronicles,” which is projected to cost $100 million and
promises a “comprehensive, systematic and objective” record of the city’s last
7,000 years. In official yearbooks that summarize the government’s
achievements, references to past cooperation with Western countries — which had
been reprinted without change for decades — have disappeared.
Along with the national security
lessons for schools, the government also is overhauling and halving the
instruction time for a subject called liberal studies. Pro-Beijing
politicians say those lessons, which are dedicated to nurturing
critical thinking, have poisoned young people against the government. Officials
say the new curriculum should teach facts about Hong Kong and China’s recent
development but should not ask students to analyze them.
The government’s education bureau
has denied that its new national security curriculum is brainwashing, calling
such labels “malicious” in a statement on Monday.
Battles over history are
ubiquitous, in democracies and authoritarian states, among scholars, governments
and the general public. Historians are the first to acknowledge that there is
no such thing as an objective record. Hong Kong’s antigovernment activists have
also selectively deployed historical events to rally support.
Still, the Chinese government —
which regained control of the territory from Britain in 1997 — is uniquely
adept at, and fixated on, controlling the historical narrative. In mainland
China, major events, including the government’s 1989 massacre of Tiananmen
Square protesters, have been largely erased from public memory by censorship
and official directives that insist on “patriotic
education.”
Critics fear that model is being
imported to Hong Kong. The city’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, said recently
that the “Hong Kong Chronicles” project would help residents, “especially the
younger generation, better understand the inseparable relationship between Hong
Kong and the country.”
Chan Hei Tung, a teacher of liberal
studies, said the government’s flattened narrative would only distance students
from the city and the country that the authorities want them to love. He had
previously used stories about Hong Kong’s past to encourage students to analyze
present-day issues. Under the government’s new initiative, he said, “what they
have to do is just memorize and follow and respect the authorities.”
“The interaction between their
generation and their city and the whole society will be gone,” said Mr. Chan,
who also serves on the executive committee of a pro-democracy teachers’ union.
“They don’t have a role to commit in changing the history.”
As soon as the first, nearly
800-page volume of the “Hong Kong Chronicles” project was published in
December, pro-democracy advocates attacked it for describing the 2014
Occupy Central movement as “illegal.” The chronicle made no mention of
a march
of at least 350,000 people on July 1, 2014, that had helped catalyze
the movement. But it did mention a counterprotest that the police said drew
about 100,000 people.
Others criticized the book for
characterizing antigovernment protesters who clashed
violently with the police in 2016 as “rioters,” noting that it called
pro-Communist forces who had
done the same in 1967 “protesting workers.” The book also did not
mention that the pro-Communist protesters had planted bombs that killed, among
others, an 8-year-old girl and her toddler brother.
The nonprofit organization behind
the chronicles is led by Tung Chee-hwa, a former chief executive of Hong Kong.
The project names as “honorary patrons” Mrs. Lam, the current chief executive,
and Luo Huining, the central government’s top
official in Hong Kong.
Lau Chi-pang, a history professor
at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and a director of the project, said he hoped
the chronicles could be a “very handy source” for schoolteachers.
Professor Lau said the authors had
tried only to list events, not pass judgment on them. But he acknowledged that
he, like all historians, brought a political perspective to his work.
“I have always been seen as a
pro-government scholar, and I don’t deny that,” he said.
Professor Lau is also the chairman
of the government committee that is redesigning the liberal studies curriculum,
to cut instruction time in half and make the subject pass-fail. He said
expectations for the subject were too high.
“You don’t expect at this
high-school level, or even college level, that social issues or political
issues can easily be taught with reasonable depth,” he said.
Students should focus on learning
the facts, not necessarily assessing their context, he said: “They need to know
that, after 1997, Hong Kong is part of China. They only need to know about
that. We don’t want them to analyze anything out of that.”
While the government’s focus on
modern history has drawn the most attention, its revisions stretch back to
ancient times.
In the government’s annual yearbook, one
chapter is dedicated to history, starting with archaeological relics from about
6,000 years ago.
Between 1997 and 2016, the
yearbook consistently declared that those prehistoric cultures
had evolved “locally, independent of any major outside influences.” But in 2017,
that phrasing disappeared. Instead, the record said, Hong Kong’s culture had
“developed out of influence from central China.”
Longstanding mentions of “liberal
British rule” over Hong Kong also vanished in subsequent years. Hong Kong’s
participation in “the Allied cause” during World War II became “the
anti-Japanese cause,” echoing a rallying cry the Communist Party has used to
stoke nationalist fervor.
Bao Pu, who owns a publishing
house focused on modern Chinese history, said re-evaluating the story of
British influence on Hong Kong was justified. During the colonial period,
Chinese residents were subjected to segregation and racism, which the yearbooks
barely mentioned.
But it is also wrong to try to
erase the legacy of that period entirely, he said: “They have ambitions to
eradicate that Hong Kong identity, which is different from Chinese identity.”
In response to the government’s
efforts, activists and other amateur historians have tried to preserve their
own stories. Facebook pages and pop-up exhibitions led by pro-democracy
supporters have proliferated.
Some of those projects have also
lacked context, sometimes offering misleading information about previous chief
executives or painting an “overly rosy” view of colonialism, said Florence Mok,
a postdoctoral fellow who studies Hong Kong history at Nanyang Technological
University in Singapore.
“This kind of misuse of history is
very common, in posters and propaganda by both the regime and also activists,”
she said, adding, “We really have very little control over how people will read
into our work.”
Still, some worry that critics’
alternate narratives will be stamped out — along with, eventually, the
curiosity and critical thinking that fueled them.
Amy Lam, a stay-at-home mother who
participated in the 2019 protests, said her friends with younger children
worried that the new curriculum guidelines would ensure that the children never
learned to consider opposing viewpoints.
Ms. Lam felt more confident that
her own daughter, 15, had already begun developing the necessary skills. Even
so, she was eager for her to graduate from high school and enroll at a
university abroad.
“She will be out of the whole
system very soon. I think we just have to stick in there, and hopefully things
don’t change so much,” she said. “But for the younger ones, I feel sorry for
them, especially those just getting into primary school and their parents. It’s
going to be tough.”
