Y Chinese Culture vs. Hong Kong?

I have been wondering the grounds of this pseudo-question of Chinese culture in Hong Kong, even precisely in colonial period. Hong Kong is, after all, let alone the foreign community, a Chinese society.

In his "Chinese Culture in the Hong Kong Curriculum: Heritage and Colonialism" (in Philip Stimpson and Paul Morris (eds.), Curriculum and Assessment for Hong Kong: Two Components, One System (Hong Kong: Open University of Hong Kong Press, 1998), pp. 51-74), Beranrd Hung-kay Lu contends that "[f]rom the beginning, Hong Kong was a Chinese as well as a British colony [I agree]...The Chinese colonists coming to Hong Kong from the neighboring counties of South China, on the other hand, were outcasts from the Chinese empire"

"Both colonies," he argues, "shared a common aspiration with respect to economic gain and a transient attitude with regards to the territory of Hong Kong - home, to which one would return enriched, was elsewhere [very true]...it was a city built by Chinese colonists under British sponsorship. [could't agree more]" (p. 55)

He adds "generations of Hong Kong Chinese pupils grew up, learning from the Chinese culture subjects to identify themselves as Chinese but relating that Chineseness to neither contemporary China nor the local Hong Kong landscape. It was a Chinese identity in the abstract, a patriotism of the émigré probably held all the more absolutely because it was not connected to tangible reality [ironical] ...Nor is it inconvenient for colonialists, of whatever coloration, that this remain so."

Luk draws my attention to T. C. Cheng's "The Education of Overseas Chinese: A Comparative Study of Hong Kong, Singapore, and the East Indies" (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of London, Institute of Education, 1949) and I hope that I will have a chance to look it up. Also from the same volume, I found another article particularly interesting and related to my experience in secondary school: Paul Morris, Gerry McClelland and Wong Ping Man's "Explaining Curriculum Change: Social Studies in Hong Kong", pp. 103-124. (originally in Comparative Education Review, Vol. 41, No.1), in which Morris (et. al.) traces the emergence of a new school subject social studies in historical context with reference to the socioeconomic development of HK, and education trends in the UK and USA in the 1970s.

BTW, another paper on this subject. 區志堅：〈香港大學中文學院成立背景之研究〉，《香港中國近代史學報》，第4期（2006），頁29-57。