當年今日
關於我們

Should an authority be struck off too when its official documents are biased?|Yeung Wing-yu

蘋果日報 2021/01/19 10:29


The Education Bureau is set to strike off a secondary government school for allegedly using “inappropriate and biased teaching materials”. Meting out a severe punishment to a teacher because of “biased” teaching materials is a new thing in the education sector. This is without precedent in the history of Hong Kong. My late father used to teach at a pro-Beijing school when he was young. He wanted to promote patriotism in Hong Kong. Fortunately, the British colonial system was backward enough not to impose heavy punishments on biased teaching materials, or my family would struggle to make ends meet.
In recent years, the Education Bureau has been taking a more hands-on approach to teaching materials. In 2018, it decided that a textbook was guilty of “using inappropriate wording” for stating that “Hong Kong is located in the south of China”. One wonders if the education authority has also demanded name changes of China Southern Airline, Southern Daily and the South Bureau, a body of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the revolutionary time. In mainland China, there is the saying that “old revolutionaries encounter a novel problem”. This is exactly what is happening in the education sector in Hong Kong today.

Official documents that distort facts

When it comes to “biased” teaching materials, the most memorable for me is a text from the “Basic Principle of Textbook Revision” drawn up by the Textbook Review Taskforce of the Curriculum Development Council, which reads: “When referring to Hong Kong’s former ‘colonial’ status, please be aware that China has never recognized Hong Kong as a ‘colony’, and that in the 1970s the UN abolished Hong Kong’s title as a ‘British colony’. Therefore, if one must use that description in textbooks, consider adding quotation marks or a footnote, or providing the historical background.” Because of this guideline, school textbooks cannot describe pre-handover Hong Kong as a colony and must add quotation marks if the term “colony” has to be used, or the textbook can hardly be approved by the authorities.
Yours truly is too stupid to understand that basic principle. The fact that Hong Kong was a colony before 1997 is something that cannot be disputed. As the website of the Legislative Council states clearly, “from 26 January 1841 to 30 June 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony.” The law had always used the term “colony” before gradually switching to “Hong Kong” in the 1980s. However, many legal ordinances were not amended before 1997. Two years after the handover, the government amended the description as it had to gazette the new description for legal adaptation. In other words, the term “colony” before 1997 was an an important constitutional concept, and in the few years after the handover, it was still used in some legal provisions.
Is it really true that China has never recognized Hong Kong as a “colony”? After taking power, the CCP refused to acknowledge unequal treaties, and indeed it did not recognize Hong Kong as a colony. But a century before that, Hong Kong’s colonial status was never disputed. The Treaty of Nanking made it clear that Hong Kong was permanently ceded to Britain, which was why Hong Kong was not included in the political regions of China or maps of China before 1949. Since Hong Kong’s cession was permanent, the Chinese government presumably could not question Britain what systems it would practice in Hong Kong and how it described the city, unless there were some fundamental changes to the treaty. Before 1949, Chinese leaders generally did not dismiss Hong Kong’s colonial status. For example, in Sun Yat-sen’s speech in Kobe, Japan, in 1924, in which he stressed the need to abolish unequal treaties, he said “Hong Kong has been completely ceded to Britain and is managed by the British; it is a full colony of Britain”. His argument was that the status of Chinese people under unequal treaties was lower than that of Chinese people under colonial rule. The colonial status of Hong Kong formed the basis of his argument.
The claim that the UN abolished Hong Kong’s title as a “British colony” in the 1970s is factually wrong. At the time, the UN had a List of Non-Self-Governing Territories, which included not only colonies but also mandated territories. Hong Kong and Macau were on the list. Amid the wave of decolonization, colonial governments and administrating countries had the obligation to raise the level of autonomy of the places they managed and eventually let them go independent. There was also the Special Committee on Decolonization, which was responsible for monitoring the development of various places on the said list. With the list and the committee, Hong Kong and Macau could eventually go independent under the supervision of the UN, but that would be something the CCP did not want to happen. Therefore, a year after it joined the UN, China demanded the withdrawal of Hong Kong and Macau from the list. Yet removing Hong Kong from the list only meant the city would no longer be monitored by the UN. Its political situation (i.e. its status as a British colony) remained unchanged. In fact, after it was taken out from the list in 1972, British Foreign Minister Alexander Douglas-Home came to Hong Kong after visiting China in the same month. During the trip, he said Hong Kong’s status would not change.
If the second part of the Curriculum Development Council’s principle has to be consistent with historical facts, it should be changed to “in the 1970s the UN removed the possibility of Hong Kong going independent”. And if the Hong Kong government is to seriously implement an anti-Hong Kong independence principle, the Education Bureau should actually reassert pre-handover Hong Kong’s colonial status, recognize the decision made by the Special Decolonization Committee in 1972, and promote the fact that the UN made it impossible for Hong Kong to go independent in 1972.
The teacher set to be de-registered reportedly taught technology-related subjects before switching to liberal studies. This means humanities are not the teacher’s forte. It seems there is a mismatch of talent. If teachers who teach subjects that they do not specialize in can be struck off, then we should ask a question: when there are serious mistakes in the Basic Principle of Textbook Revision, which is drafted by experts including “scholars, school principals and teachers” and has an impact on individual schools, school textbooks and even all students in Hong Kong, what punishment should the authorities mete out?
Click here for Chinese version
We invite you to join the conversation by submitting columns to our opinion section: [email protected]
Apple Daily reserves the right to refuse, abridge, alter or edit guest opinion columns for accuracy, length, clarity, and style, and the right to withdraw and withhold columns based on the discretion of our editorial page editors.
The opinions of the writers do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial board.
---------------------------------
Apple Daily’s all-new English Edition is now available on the mobile app: bit.ly/2yMMfQE
To download the latest version,
Or search Appledaily in App Store or Google Play