Motivated by recent measurements of the radiative decay rates of the P -wave spin singlet charmonium hc to the light meson η or η by the BESIII Collaboration, we investigate the decay rates of these channels at order αα 4 s . The photon is radiated mainly from charm quark pairs in the lowest order Feynman diagrams, since the diagrams where a photon radiated from light quarks are suppressed by αs or the relative charm quark velocity v, due to Charge parity conservation. The form factors of two gluons to η or η are employed, which are the major mechanism for η and η productions. η(η ) is treated as a light cone object when we consider that the parent charmonium mass is much heavier than that of the final light meson. We obtain the branching ratio B(hc → γη ) = (1.94in the nonrelativistic QCD approach, which is in agreement with the BESIII measurement. The prediction of the branching ratio of hc → γη is also within the range of experimental error after including the larger uncertainty of the total decay width Γ hc . The applications of these formulae to the radiative decays to η(η ) of the P -wave spin singlet bottomonium h b (nP ) are presented. These studies will shed some light on the η − η mixing effects, the flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking, as well as the nonperturbative dynamics of charmonium and bottomonium.