Hong Kong delegates push plan at NPC for kids to love the motherland

The Chinese government should build teams of teachers to promote patriotic education in Hong Kong as the best way to counter the “arduous situation” created by the pro- democracy movement and student-led protests last year, delegates to the government’s advisory body said.
The Chinese government should establish education “bases” to better deliver a “national and moral education,” according to a transcript of comments from a meeting of Hong Kong and Macau delegates to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing. Delegates said the government should develop materials to teach about China’s history, including its sovereignty over the city, according to minutes seen by Bloomberg.
“This will just motivate more teens and youths to come to join” protests, said Joshua Wong, founder of student activist group Scholarism. Hong Kong youths born after the 1990s are reluctant to engage with China because they don’t think Beijing will resolve the city’s problems, he said.
National education remains a sensitive issue in Hong Kong and the city’s 2012 effort to introduce a Beijing-backed curriculum triggered protests by tens of thousands that led to the plan being scuttled. Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has said that the students who led last year’s protests against Beijing’s plan to vet candidates for Hong Kong’s leadership election were misguided because they hadn’t been properly educated.
“People do not understand why Beijing should be involved; people do not understand the unique design of this local democracy,” Leung said in an interview in October.
Headmasters in universities and schools and education officials should be cultivated to “love the country and Hong Kong” and formed into teams to lead the effort, said Lo Man- tuen, chairman of Wing Li Group Ltd and a member of the CPPCC, which advises the government and the legislature known as the National People’s Congress. The sense of a national Chinese identity “has sunk to a new low” in the city, said Lo.
The new suggestions on education were made at a March 4 meeting open only to state-controlled media between CPPCC delegates from Hong Kong and Macau with Zhang Dejiang, chairman of the NPC, which is gathering in Beijing through next week. Hong Kong has been a special administrative region of China since the British returned its former colony in 1997 and sends delegates to the NPC and the CPPCC.
Connie Wong Wai-Ching, president of the Kowloon Federation of Associations and another member to the CPPCC, suggested the government should reintroduce mandatory Chinese history classes in secondary schools and produce television series to help get the notion of Chinese sovereignty over the city “implanted into the brain” of the public.
The effort should also target the city’s international schools, which cater to foreigners and Hong Kong families interested in bilingual education for their children, she said. The city’s 50 international schools tend to operate under the curricula of their home countries ranging from the United Kingdom to South Korea.
Tam Yiu-chung, a member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council and delegate to the CPPCC, suggested hiring mainland legal experts to teach about the city’s de-facto constitution, the China-drafted Basic Law, in Hong Kong universities.
Exchanges between law schools in Hong Kong and China should be more frequent, and symposiums aimed at promoting the Basic Law should be held on a regular basis, he said.
Peter Lam, chairman of Lai Sun Development Co., pledged at the meeting that Hong Kong’s business elite shall play “a bigger role” in the city’s political and legislative affairs.
“The industrial and business circle has withstood the test” during the Occupy Central “illegal movement,” Lam said.
Hong Kong’s tycoons have opposed the pro-democracy movement known as Occupy Central, saying it harmed social order and threatens to reduce the city’s competitive edge. Bloomberg