Foreign influenced education is only part of the problem. The bigger problem is Hongkongers are officially been treated as a higher class of Chinese citizens in mainland.
There are numerous special privileges exclusive to Hongkongers. For instances, Hongkongers are allowed purchase real estate in Guangdong without the need to provide tax records nor records of social security payments. Hongkong students require much lower scores for admittance into tier one mainland universities. There are one-sided agreements for Hongkong licensed architects, financial professionals to practice in mainland, but no reciprocity.
From many HKers perspective, they see themselves as better and CCP is groveling for royalty after the return. Unfortunately, this ill-founded notion is currently being reinforced by CCP's own preferential policies.
I disagree.
Foreign influenced education is the biggest part of the problem. When majority of the civil servants and elites sent their children at the age of eight to British schools, do you think these kids would be loyal to China and Hong Kong. After a few decades and hundreds of thousands of these youngsters been educated in UK and come back to HK, many of them become lawyers, doctors, accountants, civil servants, politicians, businessmen. What do you think, would happen to the Hong Kong society.
Same thing with the mainland Chinese, during the early days of the pandemic, those British educated kids were chartered back to mainland and given special privileges. Do you think these kids would grow up and have positive views of China.
When the HK media constantly exaggerated some negative news about mainland China and at the same time glorified Westerners every day. When the media blame the mainland Chinese for every problems in HK. How would that affect the thinking of average Hong Kongers. I think many people underestimate the power of the propaganda and media. At the beginning of the protests, many young kids who never been to China and don't have strong political views but in matter of days they become the core of the protests and riots. It is not only superior complex and tribalism that turn these youngsters to become rioters but the Hong Kong society has been infiltrated from top to bottom so that the US and Taiwan could easily incite hatred and violence.
I don't want to minimize the issue of superiority complex of some Hong Kong people or the issue of special privileges. But whatever superiority complex that Hong Kongers have, it isn't the main factor anymore as the rise of China has made sure that Hong Kongers aren't better. No matter how much they want to deny that. As for privileges, all privileges should be eliminated or reciprocal. However, these privileges were not granted to Hong Kongers alone but also to overseas Chinese and Taiwanese. The aim is to attract talents but the issue of fairness hasn't been addressed.
I do think the central government needs to take a hard line to force the Hong Kong government to allow mainland professionals to work in Hong Kong. Many of these medical and lawyer associations are anti-China anyway. So Hong Kong government doesn't have a good reason to delay the process of granting licenses to mainland professionals.