Xi Unleashes Billion-Dollar Drive To Erase HK's Colonial Past

Hong Kong plans to spend millions of dollars printing middle school textbooks that deny the Chinese territory was ever a British colony.

Photo Insert: China claims that the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong and the nearby former Portuguese colony of Macao were merely "occupied" by foreign powers and that China never relinquished sovereignty over them.

China claims that the semi-autonomous city of Hong Kong and the nearby former Portuguese colony of Macao were merely "occupied" by foreign powers and that China never relinquished sovereignty over them, Mainichi Shimbun reported on June 17, 2022.

It's not a new position for China, but the move is a crude example of Beijing's determination to enforce its interpretation of history and events and inculcate patriotism as it tightens its grip over Hong Kong following massive protests demanding democracy in 2019, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

"Hong Kong has been Chinese territory since ancient times," says a new textbook seen by the AP.

"While Hong Kong was occupied by the British following the Opium War, it remained Chinese territory." It is one of four sets of textbooks being offered to schools to replace those currently in use, all of which state the same position, Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper reported earlier this week.

With the exception of Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945, Hong Kong was a British colony from 1841 until 1997, when it was handed over to Chinese authority. A pair of 19th-century treaties negotiated at the end of the first and second Opium Wars, as well as a 99-year lease granted to the New Territories in 1898, gave it colonial status.

China's Communist Party, which came to power in 1949 after a civil war, claims it has never recognized the "unequal treaties" that the ancient Qing Dynasty was forced to sign after military setbacks. In the late twentieth century, Britain and China engaged in lengthy discussions over the terms of Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule.

In 1997, China assumed sovereignty of Hong Kong under a "one nation, two systems" agreement that promised to maintain the city's economic, political, and judicial institutions separate for the next 50 years. Although China today refuses to accept the agreement, it was put forth in a Sino-British Joint Declaration lodged with the United Nations in 1984.

"The Communist Party has a monopoly of the truth and of history in China," said Steve Tsang, a Chinese politics specialist at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

He added, "In the Xi approach to history, facts are merely incidental. Only interpretation matters. And only one interpretation is allowed."

Mary Gallagher, who teaches Chinese studies at the University of Michigan, said then-Chinese leader Mao Zedong wanted to ensure that Hong Kong would remain part of China. "So Hong Kong moves between the Chinese empire and the British empire but loses its right to determine its own future," she said.

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