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Nervous echoes
For Chinese leaders, the youth-led protests in Hong Kong contained disturbing echoes of a dangerous time for the Communist Party: the student-led Tiananmen protests that briefly rocked their takeover. After cracking down on the protests, in 1991 the Party began introducing a patriotic education campaign on the mainland. The main goal was to constantly remind students of China’s “century of humiliation” and the role of the Communist Party in repelling foreign powers and restoring national sovereignty.
The project was incredibly successful, says Zhao Suisheng, a professor at the University of Denver who studied the education campaign. “In China today, nationalistic sentiments are prevalent among young people,” Zhao said. “This is the result of patriotic upbringing. They only gave them the information they wanted them to have and tried to block all other information.”
Up until now, designing that kind of groupthink in Hong Kong hasn’t been easy. On a visit to the city in 2007, Chinese President Hu Jintao called for fostering a strong sense of national identity among young people. The local government has opened the funding tap, allocating more money to national education.
However, there was no immediate result in patriotic sentiment. In 2012, tens of thousands of students, parents and teachers protested the government’s attempt to introduce a compulsory national education subject, and the government backed down.
(Photograph: Reuters)
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