Hong Kong Ming Pao reported that the new edition of the textbook reminded teachers in a memorandum that “although Britain was dissatisfied with the Qing court’s imposition of various trade restrictions and unsuccessfully requested the Qing court to improve trading conditions, these issues were not directly related to the outbreak of the Opium War”, and deleted the negative narrative of the old edition that mentioned the Qing dynasty, including “The old version also removes the negative narratives of the Qing Dynasty, including “the ‘heavenly dynasty’ and the “closed country”, and directly uses the importation of opium by British merchants as the starting point of the war.
Older Hong Kong history textbooks refer to the background of the Opium War, including the Qing Dynasty’s restrictions on trade, the failure of Sino-British trade negotiations, the importation of opium to mainland China by British merchants, the prohibition of smoking by the Qing Dynasty’s Imperial Minister Lin Zexu, the sale of cigarettes at Humen, and the incident in which British troops beat and killed Tsim Sha Tsui villager Lin Weixi, leading to the outbreak of the war.
In the official history of the Chinese Communist Party, the opium trade was the root cause of the Opium War. This narrative now seems to be showing signs of being transplanted to Hong Kong.
Chinese sociologist and historian Zhou Xiaozheng says that the CCP writes history to fool the people and to deceive them. The narrative of historical events should be proportional to the accounts of the people involved, in order to achieve comprehensiveness and objectivity. People’s University, the leading researcher of history on the mainland, has always advocated seeking truth from facts and treating history teaching and research as a tenet of listening to both sides. However, the Chinese Communist Party has always run counter to this advocacy. The former NPC associate professor, who moved to the United States, also said that the CCP designs history and educates history according to the needs of the ruling party.
Zhou Xiaozheng: What we learned on the mainland now seems to be false in many cases, including the Opium War. The opium war should be clarified, listen to both, listen to what the British said, listen to what the Republic of China said, and listen to what the late Qing Dynasty said, including what the Communist Party said.
Zhou Xiaozheng explained to our audience that the Chinese Communist Party has never stopped growing and trading opium throughout its history, and he has personal experience of this.
Zhou Xiaozheng: I went to the countryside in ’68, I was in the Heilongjiang Construction Corps of the Chinese Communist Army, we were in the 852 farm, from ’68 to ’76, what did we do every year for 8 years? Grow opium! You say the United Kingdom, India’s opium sold to you, what is wrong? It’s not a commodity. We were growing opium in the Northern Wilderness of Heilongjiang, and we were called Strategic Materials 100. It was called the Chinese Communist Army Strategic Materials No. 100. Because at that time do not say opium, say code. This morning went to work, the company commander said, “What is the captain doing today? “Cut No. 100.” That’s cutting opium to go. So this statement that they made about the Opium War, I think a lot of it is untrue.
In our comparison of junior and senior high school lesson plans on the Opium War on the mainland, the chapter on the Opium War is set as the focus of the required history course, and is classified as the starting point of modern Chinese history, the beginning of China’s descent into a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society.
The lesson plan requires students to recognize that Britain used three “bricks” to open the door to China. The first brick was commodities, and students were first guided to look at the legitimate trade situation between Britain and China, pointing out that the normal trade situation did not meet the requirements of British aggression and plunder, and then the second brick was used instead – smuggling opium. The teacher should point out that this was not legitimate commerce, but drug trafficking and plundering. Finally, the teacher should point out that opium smuggling was a disaster for the Chinese nation and that a strict ban on opium was imperative.
On May 1, 2020, Xinhua, the mainland official media, fired the first shot, saying that a Hong Kong history teacher “distorted the history of the Opium War”. The Ta Kung Pao published an opinion piece titled “The “yellow” teacher who fed children “opium”, pointing out that the teacher in question was calling a stag a horse and confusing right and wrong, saying that similar problematic teaching materials are not isolated in Hong Kong and must be eliminated at the root. The “yellow” teacher soil must be fundamentally eliminated before Hong Kong can have hope for stability.
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