Which is to say: However much China denounces Western countries’ colonial legacy, it, too, has a long past as an imperialist power, and Hong Kong’s life in the Chinese empire began as a spoil of bloody conquests, as a colony. The year of the handover from Britain, 1997, marked at least the third time that the city was subjected to the sovereignty of a central kingdom of China.

And Hong Kongers know colonialism when they see it.

Government leaders in both Beijing and Hong Kong, as well as the more clever Communist sympathizers here, are aware of this perception problem. It is one reason, for example, they want to revise the Chinese-history curriculum in Hong Kong schools in order to bring it in line with that on the mainland.

But doubling down on political brainwashing this way is unlikely to serve their cause. It was an attempt to promote this so-called patriotic education in Hong Kong in 2012 that sparked the student protest movement Scholarism, which later became part of the 2014 Umbrella Movement, which in turn helped spawn new political parties that today advocate varying degrees of self-determination.

Beijing’s recent efforts to get the Hong Kong government to punish expressions of disrespect for the Chinese national anthem also seem to be backfiring. In one school commencement ceremony after another, newly minted graduates have flouted the hymn, even at the risk of jeopardizing their job prospects in a market increasingly dominated by firms from the mainland. Scorn for the Chinese Communist Party is extending to symbols of the Chinese state.

Yet even as the political schism deepens between Beijing and Hong Kong separatists, the traditional pan-dems seem to be losing their power to mobilize protests. What would once have been hot-button issues now draw only thin crowds into the streets. When throughout the fall, a self-described “concerned group” backed by the major pan-dem parties called for various marches to oppose a plan to enforce Chinese immigration law at a new train terminal in Hong Kong, only a few hundred people participated.

This disconnect reveals a rift within the pro-democracy camp. All democrats here essentially hate the authoritarian Chinese government, its bullying and its meddling with Hong Kong’s autonomy. But they disagree over the nature of their own Chinese heritage, and Hong Kong’s.

According to a recent poll by the University of Hong Kong that asked local residents if they identified as “Hong Kongers,” “Hong Kongers in China,” “Chinese in Hong Kong” or “Chinese,” nearly 70 percent of respondents aged 18-29 called themselves “Hong Kongers.” Just 0.3 percent called themselves “Chinese” — by far the lowest such figure since the poll was first conducted, in August 1997. For all age groups combined, almost 68 percent of respondents identified as “Hong Kongers” or “Hong Kongers in China,” compared with less than 31 percent who identified as “Chinese” or “Chinese in Hong Kong.” In mid-2008, more respondents had identified as the latter than the former. More and more Hong Kongers seem to feel less and less Chinese.

The sociologist Chan Kin-man, a founder of Occupy Central — the precursor to the Umbrella Movement — told an interviewer this summer that if Chinese nationalism ever required him to “suppress the quest for democracy and freedom” for Hong Kong, he would “without hesitation commit treason.” By an honest reading of the city’s history, he would be blameless.