It is true that many Hong Kongers harbor ill feelings toward China. And tensions between the people of our territory and the mainland have been particularly high this year.

Hong Kongers are increasingly frustrated that thousands of mainland women cross the border each year to give birth here — we have better hospitals and offer Hong Kong-born children permanent residency. Many people here blame speculators from the mainland for pushing up local property prices, and there are fears that Beijing will not honor its commitment to eventually allow us to freely elect our own government leaders. Recent charges of mainland interference in our normally free press haven’t helped either.

But with all these complaints, we Hong Kongers have a sense of pride in China. We are, in fact, patriotic.

We never hesitate to give donations to help victims of natural disasters on the mainland or give generously to build schools or infrastructure in rural China. We feel proud when mainland Chinese athletes win medals at the Olympics and when China sends rockets to space. China’s rise as an economic powerhouse makes us feel good.

Even after 150 years of British colonial rule, we never doubt our Chinese identity. Most people in Hong Kong have parents or grandparents who fled the mainland to escape hunger and the upheavals of the bloody civil war in the 1940s, but they remain deeply attached to their roots.

Because we care about our country, we share the pain of the Chinese citizens whose rights are violated. Tens of thousands of people gather every year on the night of June 4 to commemorate the victims of the Tiananmen crackdown. And when a little-known Tiananmen movement activist, Li Wangyang, died under mysterious circumstance in June, over 20,000 people rallied to urge the mainland authorities to investigate his death.

What we object to is the imposition of the party line on our children. We should be allowed to love the country in our own way. Children in Hong Kong need to know about the huge progress that China has made in the past 30 years, but they also have the right to know about the sins of the past. Millions of “class enemies” were killed in Mao Zedong’s “land reforms.” At least 30 million died of starvation during his “Great Leap Forward,” and millions more during the Cultural Revolution.