Hong Kong people don’t need any history lessons from mainland China, thanks
Shen Jian says the story of Hong Kong is not a story of humiliation, and it doesn’t start with the Treaty of Nanking – even if that’s what Beijing and its supporters want us to believe
Many of Hong Kong’s oldest temples, built in the 17th and 18th centuries, are consecrated in the name of Hau Wong. It is the honorary title bestowed upon Yang Liangjie, a general who defended the last emperor of the Song dynasty until his, and the dynasty’s, dying breath in 1279, not far from what is now Kowloon City. No one remembers that the Song dynasty made its last stand in Hong Kong.
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Spare us the history lesson. We can tell our own history, thank you very much. And ours is not one of pathetic humiliation at the hands of imperialist running dogs, even though our self-appointed tutors always neglect to mention it was they who threw us to the dogs in the first place.
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Long before China the drug addict gave us away to her British dealers, Hong Kong had been valiantly fighting off would-be conquerors since Tuen Mun was fortified as a naval base in the eighth century. It was on our hills and in our bays that Yang Liangjie and the Song dynasty held out that one final time against Mongol invaders, and we do not wallow in the misery of that defeat, or of our surrender to the Imperial Japanese Army on Christmas Day, 1941. No, we embrace even the fights we lost – we build temples to them – because at least we fought.
Beijing treats us like we have Stockholm syndrome, like because we don’t buy into the nation’s collective self-pity, we are somehow “stalling the process of decolonialisation”. But it was China that was too high on opioid to defend Hong Kong from colonialism in 1842, then so wasted from withdrawal it gave more of us away in 1898. So we fended for ourselves, waging a six-day resistance against the British occupation of the New Territories in April 1899. Hundreds of local villagers perished in a battle we were never going to win, and the tombstone of their mass grave in Kam Tin still bears the Chinese character for justice and loyalty. Their sacrifice may have been misguided, but hardly humiliating.
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