Commentary
“Hong Kong was never a colony,” as asserted in some new Hong Kong textbooks, is as absurd as saying “the People’s Republic of China is not a country.” In order to uproot Hong Kong independence, textbooks are asked to distort history. However, history is like sedimentary rock, with sand and gravel accumulating layer by layer into hard rock; if changing a fundamental concept at the very starting point of a time line, the original historical discourse will be destroyed. Problems will arise before any benefit can be seen.
Problem 1: It concerns the core “evidence” they used–Hong Kong and Macau were removed from the list of colonies by the United Nations in 1972, which proved that Hong Kong was never a colony. Despite its absurd inference, let’s take it seriously: the fatal flaw of this inference rests on the success of the PRC, in replacing the Republic of China in the United Nations in 1971, or more precisely on the success of Albania and Algeria in pushing forward the agenda of “restoring” the “legal rights” of the PRC in the UN. This implies that had these “exogenous factors” not occurred at that time, Hong Kong would have remained a colony. Remove a name from a list and then the colonial status of a place can be rejected, retroactively effectively back to 1843 when the colony was founded—who will believe in this logic, except the “new Hongkongers?”…