Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong: How Each Place Teaches Chinese Identity Differently

I want to begin with a small experiment in text. Read these three phrases:

中華人民共和國。People's Republic of China. 中華民國。Republic of China. 香港特別行政區。Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

The same civilization. Three different political dispensations. Three different official accounts of what "China" means and who its people are.

I think about this when families ask me to explain what Chinese identity is and how to give their children a robust sense of it. The honest answer is that there is no single Chinese identity — there are at least three major living versions of it, and they have been in tension with each other for nearly a century. Understanding these differences is not divisive; it is prerequisite to understanding the actual landscape in which you are raising your child.

How mainland China teaches Chinese identity

The People's Republic of China's educational framework has, since 1949, treated Chinese identity as 中華民族 (zhōnghuá mínzú) — the Chinese nation, a unified entity comprising 56 ethnic groups. The Han majority provides the dominant cultural framework; the minority groups are acknowledged and celebrated but within a structure that places the unified nation above ethnic or regional difference.

Chinese identity in mainland schooling is taught as: pride in five thousand years of civilisation; the narrative of China's 百年屈辱 (hundred years of humiliation, from the Opium War to 1949) and its subsequent national rejuvenation; the political centrality of the Communist Party as the vehicle of national restoration; and a forward-looking modernisation story where China is reclaiming its rightful global position.

When I was a student in Chengdu, this narrative was simply the air I breathed. It was not presented as one interpretation among others; it was presented as history. It took leaving China and studying abroad to give me the outside vantage point to see it as a narrative — coherent, powerful, and partial.

What the mainland approach does well: it gives children a strong, grounded sense of cultural pride and historical continuity. A mainland-educated child knows where they come from in a way that I find genuinely valuable.

What it does less well: it produces, in its more intensive forms, a brittle kind of cultural identity — one that becomes defensive when challenged, because it has not been taught to hold complexity. Chinese identity as taught in mainland schools often has little room for the genuine ambiguities of Chinese history or the legitimate differences among Chinese people.

How Taiwan teaches Chinese identity

Taiwan's relationship with Chinese cultural identity is one of the most interesting and under-discussed topics in East Asian cultural politics.

The Republic of China, which governs Taiwan, has historically claimed to be the legitimate custodian of Chinese civilisation — the inheritor of pre-1949 Republican culture, and the preserver of traditional characters, classical scholarship, and the Confucian educational tradition that the mainland's Cultural Revolution disrupted. Taiwan's curriculum included classical Chinese literature in a depth that mainland schools, certainly in the Cultural Revolution period, could not match.

Since the 1990s, Taiwan has undergone a gradual process of 台灣化 (Taiwanisation) — a growing emphasis on Taiwan's specific history, language (Taiwanese Hokkien alongside Mandarin), and distinct cultural identity. The current curriculum reflects an ongoing negotiation between Chinese cultural heritage and Taiwanese political identity. Many young Taiwanese people today identify primarily as Taiwanese, not Chinese — a significant shift from a generation ago.

For families in Hong Kong, Taiwan's cultural tradition offers something valuable: a version of Chinese cultural depth (traditional characters, classical literature, Confucian educational values) that is politically distinct from the mainland narrative. Taiwanese children's books, educational resources, and classical Chinese pedagogy are excellent and widely accessible. They represent a different tradition of Chinese learning from the mainland — one that is worth knowing.

How Hong Kong teaches Chinese identity

Hong Kong's situation is the most acutely complicated, and I say this as someone who has lived and worked here for nearly a decade.

The post-1997 political framework required Hong Kong to be simultaneously "Chinese" in the PRC sense (one country, Chinese nationality) and "Hong Kong" in the sense of maintaining its distinct legal and cultural system (two systems). The educational tension this creates is real: how do you teach children to be proud of being Chinese while also maintaining the particular Hong Kong cultural identity that makes the "two systems" framework meaningful?

This tension has intensified since 2019. The new Citizenship and Social Development (CSD) curriculum that replaced Liberal Studies is explicitly oriented toward national identity, patriotism, and connection to the mainland. Many Hong Kong families — particularly those with the cultural memory of pre-2019 Hong Kong — feel that this curriculum is narrowing their children's sense of what it means to be from Hong Kong.

I navigate this carefully in my own classroom. My job as a Chinese Humanities teacher is not to deliver a political position. It is to give students the historical and cultural knowledge to understand where they are situated, and the analytical tools to think about it with some independence.

What this means for your family

If you are raising Chinese-heritage children in Hong Kong, they are growing up in a space where multiple versions of Chinese identity are in active tension. This is not a comfortable position. It is also not a bad position — it is, in fact, an extraordinarily rich educational position, if you engage with it rather than resolving the tension prematurely by choosing one narrative.

My suggestions for families:

Expose your children to all three traditions. Read mainland Chinese literature and Taiwanese children's books alongside Hong Kong cultural content. Let your children understand that Chinese people tell different stories about themselves, and that all of these stories have truth and partisanship mixed in.

Teach the contested history honestly, at an age-appropriate level. The Opium Wars, the Republic period, 1949, the Cultural Revolution, 1997 — these are not ancient history. Your child will encounter people with strong feelings about all of them. Give them enough knowledge to engage thoughtfully.

Make cultural identity a personal exploration, not a compliance exercise. The question "what does it mean to you to be Chinese, or Hong Kong, or both?" is one worth asking your children, and listening to their answer without correcting it.

The complexity is the inheritance. It is worth accepting rather than simplifying away.