There's too much focus on choosing between A or B. It should be more like the city once was a colony but it's no longer one. Instead it used what it learnt during hard times to become something far greater than it's previous self could ever imagine. That's what I believe is true victory.I want to add something onto this.
I got called a white supremacist on Xiaohongshu for saying Qingdao,Shanghai,Tianjin etc would be better cities if just let their colonial heritage die instead of making it their entire identity.
And Europeans can go yeah but we were there first. But I realized these words mean less these days coz their places are going downhill. If they were so ingenious, they could figure out a way to save their own countries instead of claiming credit for some places thousands of miles away decades later.
The whole purpose of the past is to learn from it to apply to the decisions you make today. If you're just using it to wewuz about your has been self, that's not really using it effectively.