What is interesting is that before recent years, both Taiwan and Hong Kong felt loyalty to “China”, but a different China, the old one.
With the rise of the Mainland as political and economic world power, it is increasingly making it that loyalty and love of “China”, be it the vast history and cultural legacy of the thousands of years of dynastic rule or not, also means loyalty to Beijing; Beijing, not Hong Kong or Taiwan, is the sole inheritor of the 5,000 years of cultural history, or in the historical perspective, the 天命。Because of the increasingly closer connection that is being viewed by the world between the two ideas, that is why more Taiwanese and Hong Kongers are refraining from identifying themselves as first Chinese (if they do at all), which wasn’t so in the past.