China’s effort to impose Communist ideology on the formerly free island of Hong Kong accelerated this week with the introduction of new textbooks that will teach “citizenship” — and edited Communist history — to students.
The tyrants of Beijing are well aware that students were the driving force behind the huge 2019 pro-democracy movement, and the 2014 “Umbrella Revolution” before that. A few flickers of revolutionary democratic spirit can still be found on Hong Kong campuses.
To suppress future student movements, the tightly controlled government of Hong Kong created a “citizenship” curriculum and ordered six sets of textbooks to promote it — books that have been thoroughly cleansed of content that “incited hatred among citizens and vilified the government” back when the courses were called “Liberal Studies,” as China’s state-run Global Times wrote Tuesday.
The new “citizenship” course was designed to ensure instructors can no longer “convey poisonous political views detrimental to national security in teaching.” Trainers have reportedly been dispatched to schools to make sure teachers hear this message loud and clear.
As codified in the authoritarian “national security law” Beijing imposed in violation of Hong Kong’s guaranteed autonomy in 2020, all opposition to the Communist Party is considered “detrimental to national security.”
“After the end of the social unrest in 2019, Hong Kong has gradually moved into a stable and positive atmosphere. There have been repeated calls from the education sector for reforms that focus on patriotic education,” the Global Times euphemized.
Or, the head of Hong Kong’s EDB education bureau put it, “It is necessary for schools to teach students to think positively and to love their nation.”
The indoctrination plan includes marching island students off to the Chinese mainland to reinforce the impression that Hong Kong is nothing special:
According to the syllabus, the Citizenship curriculum is divided into three sections – Hong Kong under “one country, two systems,” China since reform and opening-up, and the interconnected contemporary world. Students are also required to participate in a study tour to the Chinese mainland.
The subject was established to allow students to build a broad knowledge base through the study of topics about Hong Kong, the country and the contemporary world, and to develop a national identity as well as have a global perspective, according to the EDB.
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For example, the syllabus lists some key learning points, including the origin of the Hong Kong issue, the history of the city’s return to the motherland, the legal basis of “one country, two systems” and the Basic Law, and the significance of safeguarding national security.
As always, erasing inconvenient chunks of history is a big part of Communist “education.” The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted Hong Kong’s new textbooks “only briefly discuss the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, with no mention of a commemorative vigil held in the city.”
“Educators said some of the textbooks had compressed details of the event into a page or paragraph, as the revised syllabus was broader, while others were of the view that publishers should avoid taking a stance on the crackdown given much of the related information remained undisclosed,” the SCMP reported.
In other words, since the Chinese Communist Party refuses to admit how many freedom-seeking people it murdered at Tiananmen Square in 1989, Hong Kong children will be taught to regard the entire incident as an inscrutable mystery, a little question mark in their history books, a shrug. Hong Kong held the largest memorials for Tiananmen victims in the Chinese-speaking world until the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic was deployed as an excuse to crush them in 2020.
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