Come on, it's only a song
A woman who was in charge of recruitment at a Hong Kong company in Central once told me that she received stacks of resumes from candidates proclaiming their nationality to be British National (Overseas), rather than Chinese. I was almost as surprised as she was, but the woman made a good point. She asked me: 'Is it really better to be classified as a second-class citizen of our colonial past than admit that we are, in fact, Chinese?'
She believed that the word 'overseas' in parentheses served as an indication that we were an 'afterthought' - a way of saying: 'You have no right of abode in the United Kingdom and you're not exactly British Nationals.' I cannot argue with that, really.
But I told the young woman that there was no reason to be ashamed of our colonial past, as it is part of who we are. Equally, we should not be disparaged for who we are now.
This summer, Hong Kong cheered on Chinese athletes at the Athens Olympics. Every time we saw China's flag raised, and every time we heard our national anthem played, we felt a sense of pride. We felt part of it. That was surely not because we had been brainwashed.
But when the national anthem is played before the early evening news, we are being brainwashed, according to some. Personally, I see no grand plan by the government to hypnotise the public. After all, there is nothing sinister about playing the national anthem. Prior to the handover, God Save the Queen was broadcast, but no one, myself included, had any qualms about it. Practically speaking, there is no good reason to oppose the playing of the national anthem. There is no denying that we are part of China, after all.
We celebrate Chinese athletes at the Olympics, yet we seem to want to disown our country, and for about 95 per cent of us (according to the 2001 Census), our ethnicity. I have often called this unique phenomenon our 'split-nationality' syndrome. Is a 45-second anthem on TV the cure? Absolutely not, and it would be naive to believe so, but it is a good starting point - a way to raise our national awareness, a common ground for building national identity.
In fact, raising public awareness falls way short of what some have claimed to be brainwashing. Webster's dictionary says that brainwashing involves a systematic campaign to sever contact with the outside world, destroy feelings of self worth, tear down psychic integrity, and prevent subjects engaging in effective reality testing. Clearly, brainwashing, catchy though the word may be, is a serious accusation that the mere playing of the national anthem on TV cannot possibly live up to.
On the other hand, such an adverse reaction to a song and rather innocent images may raise a better question. Why do people react with such anti-China sentiment, so that disgust becomes a natural reaction to anything Chinese? Perhaps they are the ones who have been brainwashed?
One should feel a sense of pride in one's ethnicity, background, culture, history, and the place one calls home. It goes without saying that no single country is perfect; each has its own share of problems and challenges. Having a sense of national pride does not equate to a sense of omniscient righteousness - to believe that our nation is immune from our share of faults and problems.
There is one thing that we can be sure of: the national anthem, whether it makes you feel anything at all, is non-threatening, and will never be a good tool for brainwashing. It certainly should not be given the status of some kind of advanced weapon of mass destruction, either.
Ma Lik is chairman of the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong
