Hong Kong Appointed Secretary of Education Pushes for Mandarin Teaching

On June 28th, Taiwan media reported that the newly appointed director of the Education Bureau in Hong Kong Christine Choi Yuk-lin, strongly promoted Mandarin teaching and falsely claimed on its official website that “Cantonese is a local dialect and it is not an official language”. Choi has held a speech demanding all schools in Hong Kong to promote the mechanism of teaching in Mandarin on campus, saying that Cantonese is the only a dialect.

Andrew Chan Lok-Hang, an advocate of Cantonese studies from a non-government organization in Hong Kong said that before 2014, Christine Choi worked as a language teaching support director in the Education Bureau for nearly 10 years, and was a strong promoter of Mandarin teaching. She had even criticized the Cantonese-speaking children as demon on an educational TV channel.

In 2012, when the Hong Kong government launched the Moral Education and National Education Division, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong people went on the streets to protest against the brainwashing education. At that time, Christine Choi was regarded as one of the strong promoters of National Education. In a recent speech, Christine Choi claimed that the Hong Kong authorities will continue to update the curriculum in line with Communist China’s national security education in order to help students to understand the national status quo and strengthen the national sentiment of Hong Kong’s younger generation. Apparently, the Chinese Communist Party actively eliminates minority languages not only in mainland China but also now in Hong Kong.