Teenagers think that Chinese culture is inferior to that in the West, according to a survey.
Researchers also found 38 per cent of the 6,500 students they interviewed were proud of coming from Hong Kong and saw themselves as Hong Kongers first and as Chinese second. Many of the students, aged between 15 and 18, interviewed by the department of psychology at the University of Hong Kong thought the only way China could be modernised was by copying the West.
The survey was part of the Psychological Analysis of Transitional Hong Kong project started in 1995.
Research fellow Ivy Lau Yee-man, from the university's department of psychology, said: 'The general trend in those we interviewed was that they thought mainland Chinese people were inferior to people from Hong Kong.
'They also thought that the Chinese people and culture were inferior to their Western counterparts and they all agreed that modernisation of China required wholehearted Westernisation.' Only 12 per cent of the students who were interviewed in the study saw themselves as solely Chinese. The interviews, carried out between December last year and January, found that 17 per cent of the students considered themselves as Chinese first and Hong Kongers second.
Thirty-two per cent of the students defined themselves as purely Hong Kongers.