Schedium

The youth of Hong Kong lack national identity and should be taught to feel Chinese, declared Chen Zuo'er, former deputy director of the State Council’s Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office and current president of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies. "Hong Kong’s young students are intelligent and hard working. However, they lack a sense of national identity and of Chinese history," said Chen at a seminar held in Beijing on January 6. He argued that the participation of thousands of young students of Hong Kong in the recent Umbrella Revolution was a result of their lack of "national democratic [sic!] and civic awareness, life goals, and knowledge in geography, history and culture". He pointed out that Hong Kong's secretary for education is “under the supervision of the central government and Hong Kong society at all times”, according to articles 48 and 104 of the Basic Law . He urged Hong Kong's educators to take into ...

As the Umbrella Revolution unfolded and thousands of Hong Kong students and activists occupied various streets of the city demanding genuine universal suffrage , the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing and their allies in Hong Kong looked in dismay and astonishment, unable to understand what was happening. They condemned the democracy movement, which they considered an illegal act of subversion aided by foreign forces . Yet they didn't seem to take the true motives behind this popular protest seriously. If they had analysed these motives, they would have soon discovered that there are plenty of reasons why the people of Hong Kong might be dissatisfied with the status quo created by the ' one country, two systems ' model. One of them and, in my opinion, the most important one, lies in the ideologisation of society which the Communist state considers an integral part of its 'socialist' system, and which it is trying to extend to Hong Kong in ...

Time and again I stumble upon pro- or anti-Chinese articles that try to prove or disprove that Taiwan is a part of China. And I always wonder why - in the year 2014 - we are still discussing such issues as if the past had taught us nothing. Recently I read another one of those posts in which the author tried to show that Taiwan 'never belonged to China'. This question is as irrelevant to Taiwan's future as the question whether Alaska ever belonged to Russia is for the United States. There is a clear distinction between politics and history, and this distinction should be maintained and explained, so that people do not confuse the two categories. Chinese Nationalism and the New State Theory First of all, we must understand why the People's Republic of China (PRC) claims that Taiwan is part of its territory. Simply put, when the Qing Empire was defeated, humiliated and colonised by Western powers, Chinese intellectuals began to absorb Western ideas, among t...