Chinese National Education in Hong Kong - Response to Student Critique

Dillon Waugh

Hayes

English 100 – 9:10

1/30/13

Word Count: 410

Chinese National Education in Hong Kong – Response to Student Critique

I chose this piece out of interest in the world outside of America, and found both Kelly Yang’s piece and the student’s critique (with their insight and facts from having lived in Hong Kong) to be intriguing. I did fall under a brief bit of confusion in comparing the two pieces, as my view of Yang’s argument and the student’s didn’t seem to entirely line up, forcing me to backtrack and confirm and reaffirm what I’d taken from the article critiqued – it looks to me like Yang believes that Chinese national education, while indeed structured to brainwash, wouldn’t prove nearly dangerous enough to Hong Kong culture for the protestors to bother, while the student pointed to her failure to mention Hong Kong citizens’ raised hackles partly resulting from the “fifty years of no change” promise and details on the brainwashing aspects of Chinese education – facts which Yang could have easily chosen to downplay to keep her own argument strong. I’m also not exactly up-to-date on China’s modern politics or the exact course the issue of extending national education to Hong Kong seemed to be taken before the point mentioned, so I can’t fully evaluate an argument in relation to it. The original bit of writing and the student critique were no less informative alike, the student’s occasional grammatical slips aside. I wasn’t aware of the level of division between Hong Kong and mainland China (I did know that Hong Kong and Taiwan both prefer a certain distance and independence in the way that they’re viewed in relationship to China – I didn’t realize that generally citizens of Hong Kong are downright disdainful of the rest of the country), or the matter of housing prices that in part keep it going, or the promise made to Hong Kong citizens when the city left British control.

The “They Say/I Say” connecting the pieces seems clear: the student’s critique is a response to Kelly Yang, who writes in response to protestors of Chinese national education in Hong Kong, who respond to the actions and plans of the Chinese government in Beijing. I’m afraid I can’t articulate anything but a basic and shallow idea of what to say about the student’s audience and purpose, however – I imagine that their audience would be others who have read Yang’s article, with the purpose to inform further, as they provided examples of what, according to them, could have strengthened the argument posed by Yang, taken from personal familiarity.