Speak for yourself. Have you ever been to Hong Kong? Do you speak Chinese? I have been following the news on political and educational developments in Hong Kong since the 1970s, when I began my study of (standard) Chinese and Cantonese, and have especially followed news from Hong Kong from multiple sources since the first time I traveled to Hong Kong in 1982. People in Hong Kong have a legitimate, grave concern that the central government of the P.R.C. will restrict the freedom of people living in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. One of the reasons that few people in Taiwan support "reunification" on P.R.C. terms is that many people in Taiwan are well traveled in the P.R.C. proper and in Hong Kong, and know that they enjoy more freedom under their independent government.

As Confucius said, in one of his most famous take-downs, "始吾於人也、聽其言而信其行、今吾於人也、聽其言而觀其行。At first in dealing with people, I would hear their words and trust their deeds, but now my way of dealing with people is to hear their words and observe their deeds." Maybe the P.R.C. regime mostly has benign intentions toward Hong Kong, which is part of its national territory since retrocession from Britain in 1997. But retrocession has not been all upside for the people of Hong Kong, and they ought to be the people who decide what policy trade-offs they desire to live under. Action speaks louder than words, and people close to the action speak more persuasively to me than armchair observers in the United States.

AFTER EDIT: Responding to the kind reply, I have to strenuously disagree that what goes on in the United States, where most but not all primary schools are operated by (local units of) the government, and where government officials from time to time issue press releases to a free press with no prior restraint on publication, is in any way comparable to the situation in China, where all primary schools are tightly regulated by the national central government, there is no free press and much prior restraint of all publications, and where the ruling party has never subjected itself to the discipline of free and fair elections.

The term "brainwashing" originated in Chinese ("洗脑") and was used without irony by Communist Party of China political cadres in the leadership echelons of the Chinese armed forces fighting in Korea to describe practices of torture to influence the ideology of captured Korean and United Nations P.O.W.s. The current news about the situation in Hong Kong includes the background that people in Hong Kong objected to new textbooks slanted to support the Party as "brainwashing,"

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/09/07/hong-kong-educ...

and then a pro-Beijing leader of an NGO said "A brain needs washing if there is a problem, just as clothes need washing if they're dirty and a kidney needs washing if it's sick." That statement by Jiang Yudui, chairman of the China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong (essentially a CPC front organization) further alarmed residents of Hong Kong.

So, no, I respectfully submit that you are comparing apples to stones, and have made an inapt suggestion in the comment to which I first replied here. Again, I base my point of view on this issue on actual overseas residence in the Chinese-speaking world, including time in Hong Kong speaking to people who were born and who grew up there.