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2 Cultural Coloniality: The English Language and Schooling Poet and educationalist Chris Searle once wrote that “the English language has been a monumental force and institution of oppression and rabid exploitation throughout the 400 years of imperialist history… It was made to scorn the languages it sought to replace, and told the colonized peoples that mimicry of its primacy among languages was a necessary badge of their social mobility as well as their continued humiliation and subjection… The English language itself was the language of the master, the carrier of his arrogance and brutality” (Searle 1983: 48). Amidst Hong Kong’s post-1997 “mother-tongue” education controversies, educators in Hong Kong who insist on using Chinese as a medium of instruction in schools might not all agree with Searle’s passionate and radical view. But most of them regard the shift from a system that had privileged English to a system that emphasizes Chinese as an essential step in marking the end of colonialism in Hong Kong. Indeed, Hong Kong Chinese have two widely held beliefs concerning the dominant status of the English language: one takes the British colonizers’ decision to make English the official and dominant language of Hong Kong as a necessary condition of the imposed colonial rule; another upholds functionalism: the dominance of the English language is attributable to its commercial value. These two commonsensical beliefs lend support to different sides of the language-of-instruction debate: the former supports a nationalistic view calling for the rectification of the power asymmetry after British colonial rule ended in 1997; the latter maintains that even if colonialism were not there, the Chinese would still attach greater value to English language education. Apparently, these two views take completely different stands on the “decolonization” of language; both are indeed variants of the same constellation of colonial discourses: they either crudely simplify Hong Kong’s colonial relations or simplistically conceal Hong Kong’s colonial asymmetry. Recent studies present a far more complex picture concerning the relationships between the English language and colonialism in general. For ch.02(p.31-56).indd 31 5/21/09 11:08:05 AM Collaboration and Institutions 32 example, Pennycook (1998) traces the connections between the long history of colonialism and the English language by inspecting different discourses adhering to English as a language. He warns that to characterize colonialism according to simple stereotypes of a colonizer’s oppression and exploitation of a colonized people indeed draws attention away from the constant cultural and micropolitical operations of colonialism, although the complexities of related issuesco-existwiththedailypresenceofverysimpledichotomizing.Myanalysis, in this chapter, follows Pennycook’s lead by grasping both the complexity and the simplicity of the connections between the English language and colonialism in Hong Kong. But my focus limits itself neither to colonial discourses in a narrow sense nor to Hong Kong per se; rather, it pits the colonialism-English relationships against the complex formation of collaborative colonial power in both Hong Kong and China. I want to show that the privileged status of Englishlanguage education in Hong Kong was more likely to stem from irregular changes in policy and societal orientations than from an ingrained imperialist imperative; and I should add that this privileged status is not, and never was, attributable only to commercial demands. Rather, there were many historical nuances of English use and English education: there were various ways English might facilitate imperialist domination, but there were also moments when English was used as an instrument for social differentiation among the Chinese. I treat these nuances as instances of Hong Kong’s layered coloniality. And, by the term layered, I mean a coloniality that transcends the usual colonial binaries and that has a great bearing on the problematic formation of Hong Kong identity. Proselytizing with the Power of Warships Departing from the old approach of segregated rule, Hong Kong’s colonial government, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, took substantial measures to intervene in the realm of education. Contrary to the liberal myth that the colonial authorities in Hong Kong consistently took a laissezfaire approach to the social and cultural affairs of the local Chinese society, introduction of comprehensive school supervision in Hong Kong proceeded at a pace faster than in the British homeland. To understand the emergence of these active interventions, we need to go a long way back to trace (1) how Christian missionaries developed problematic relationships with the colonial government; (2) how proselytizing education gave way to secular education; and...

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