With particular reference to China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, this chapter is an attempt to think through the cultural and national issues in these three Chinese regions in the twenty-first century. This will be accomplished through an analysis of how the cultural identity of these localities was formed, in response to the political ideology found in Asian and China Studies.

Though Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan were influenced by the West in differing degrees, Western imperialism brought modern Western ideas and concepts as well as Western education systems and music education into all of these societies. China was never a colony (unlike Hong Kong and Taiwan), but it was influenced by other foreign cultures throughout the centuries. The ‘cultural imperialism’ thesis laid out by Carnoy (1974: 1) posits that Western formal education in colonies was consistent with the aims of imperialism and that it was ‘an important institution for transmitting knowledge and culture from generation to generation’. Carnoy maintained that ‘Western schooling in the Third World and in the industrialized countries themselves’ was not the liberating force it was portrayed as but rather part of a complex web of ‘imperialist domination’ (ibid.: 3). Similarly, Altbach and Kelly (1978) claim that the purpose of education reflected the interests of the colonizers: though there were differences in the advanced schooling of colonizers from diverse countries, the various regimens had in common an underlying principle that education should be instrumental or functional in fulfilling the needs and discernments of the colonizers rather than the colonized (also see Bray 1992; Hayhoe 2015; Takeshi and Mangan 1997).