In recent years, the government has pumped millions of dollars into national education, funding programmes for thousands of secondary-school students to take part in mainland-Hong Kong exchange schemes and study trips. The chief executive said, in his 2008 policy address, that the government would increase the annual quota to 37,000 places, and expenditure in 2009-2010 will go up to a total of HK$67 million. The rise in expenditure underscores the perceived urgency.
Hong Kong has good reason to pay special attention to the importance of 'national education'. Unlike Singapore, Hong Kong has not gone through a process of nation-building by wresting self-rule from its colonial master, and then separation from a hostile neighbour to form an independent state.
During the colonial era, to be British meant being a step up the social ladder. Senior government and professional jobs required British nationality. Since the communist takeover in 1949, China has, for a long time, represented to western eyes everything that is 'politically incorrect': an authoritarian regime, one-party state, retarded human rights, lack of transparency, and friendship with 'rogue states', just to name a few things.
After three decades of economic reform and opening up, China has no doubt earned a respectable place on the international stage by virtue of its economic achievement. The devastation of the free world's economies after the financial crisis has led some pundits to assert that 'communism is the new capitalism', or that 'the centralised developmental state works better than some democracies'. Be that as it may, the ghost of Hong Kong's colonial past still makes it hard for some to identify themselves with China or, for that matter, any country.
Care should be taken not to equate the rise in patriotism during China's Olympic moment, the heroes' welcome for the Shenzhou space flight astronauts, or the outpourings of sympathy for the Sichuan quake victims as unmistakable signs of a greater sense of national identity. National achievement or, conversely, national catastrophe drums up feelings of patriotism. But it would be a travesty of patriotism to suggest that people only become patriotic when it is possible to bask in the reflection of the nation's glory. Hong Kong people's spontaneous, generous response to the quake victims might demonstrate that 'blood is thicker than water', but ties of blood are irrelevant in the case of Chinese, overseas or local, who have absorbed western lifestyles and values.
The fact is that, as American political scientist Samuel Huntington argued, 'people identify with those who are most like themselves and with whom they share a perceived common ethnicity, religion, traditions, and myth of common descent and common history'. Chinese who have lived abroad know that the strongest ties that bind compatriots from different territories emanate from common traditions, shared beliefs and history.