Provisional legislator David Chu Yu-lin has come across to many people as unconventional, but his recent letters to two universities complaining about their academic staff, who disagreed with him, are nothing but old-fashioned bullying tactics.
The recent row between Mr Chu and the Chinese University's Professor Richard Baum and Tim Hamlett of the Baptist University was triggered by the lawmaker's recent column (in the South China Morning Post ) on patriotic education.
In his column on July 10, Mr Chu referred to 'how the teaching of history and indeed Chinese culture [in Hong Kong] was either discouraged or distorted to cater for colonial expediency' under British rule.
In his view, Professor Baum's criticism against him showed the don was not qualified to lecture Chinese people on patriotism. But in my view, on reading what Mr Chu has written in this newspaper, I think he is as alien, if not more so, to the local education scene as he thinks Professor Baum is.
Unlike Mr Chu who grew up in America, I was born and bred in Hong Kong and received all my education here, from kindergarten through to university. I believe I am qualified to correct some of Mr Chu's misconceptions.
It is true that under the colonial system, we were never taught about patriotism or anything like national identity and national pride, but by asserting that 'local students had been taught by the powers that be to admire slavishly whatever was British and to loathe whatever was indigenous' (Post, August 1) Mr Chu is holding many of our fine teachers in contempt.
As a beneficiary, or in Mr Chu's eyes a victim, of the local colonial education system, I cannot recall in the whole of my school life being taught that Britain was great and colonial rule superb.