The motherland’s suffocating embrace: schooling and public discourse on Hong Kong identity under the National Security Law

ABSTRACT

While ‘national education’ has regularly been invoked by post-1997 Hong Kong administrations, its pursuit has acquired new force and urgency since the introduction in 2020 of a National Security Law. Investigating the role of schooling in this reinvigorated project of thought reform, this article asks how far recent initiatives have merely amplified official identity discourse or marked a qualitative change. It does so primarily by analysing the official curriculum and textbooks for Citizenship and Social Development (CSD), introduced in 2022 to replace Liberal Studies, a subject widely blamed by nationalists for fomenting sedition. Following a comparative overview of the new and old curricula, there is a discussion of changes to the textbook treatment of: the historical framing of identity; the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ model; culture’s significance for Hong Kong’s place in China; and civil, legal and constitutional rights and duties. The analysis concludes with reflections on what these changes imply both for China’s efforts to re-educate its unruly Hong Kong subjects, and for scholarly efforts to understand and explain such processes.

摘要

虽然1997年后香港政府经常诉诸‘国民教育’，但自2020年《国家安全法》出台以来，对该教育的施行呈现新的力度和紧迫性。通过调查学校教育在这一卷土重来的思想改造工程中的角色，本文探讨这些近期举措仅是对官方身份话语的强化，亦或标志着一种质变。文章主要分析了2022年颁布的《公民与社会发展》的官方课程和教科书，该课程取代了被民族主义者广泛指责煽动暴乱的《通识教育》。在对新旧课程进行比较后，文章讨论了教科书在以下方面的变化：身份认同的历史架构、‘一国两制’模式、文化对于香港在中国地位的意义，以及公民、法律和宪法的权利与义务。文章结论将反思这些变化对中国试图重新教化不臣服的香港子民意味着什么，以及学术界该如何理解和阐释这些进程。

KEYWORDS:

• Hong Kong
• China
• National Security Law
• national education
• politics
• curriculum

关键词:

• 香港
• 中国
• 国家安全法
• 国民教育
• 政治
• 课程

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Peter Baehr, Adrian Yan and anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 https://cbleportal.edb.edcity.hk/ (accessed September 10, 2022).

2 https://nslexhibition.hk/ (accessed November 23, 2022).

3 For a full list of members, see https://hk.history.museum/en_US/web/mh/exhibition/permanent/hksrenovation/expert-advisory-panel.html (accessed November 1, 2022).

4 For Liang’s full text see: https://so.gushiwen.cn/shiwenv_9ebe5eef393d.aspx (accessed March 3, 2023).

5 The HKEPC ‘Hong Kong Today’ volume was co-authored by Hui Tai Mei Har, an experienced educator and teacher trainer. For the CSD equivalent, Hui was replaced by Wong Chi Fai. Two other authors were retained.

6 On the taboo surrounding ‘refugees’, see Vickers (2005, 166).

7 Conducted online, January 7, 2023. https://www.eduhk.hk/aps/policy-dialogue-series-7-jan-2023-giving-hope-to-young-people-what-matters-and-how/.

8 On October 10, 2022, Carrico and I joined a webinar on Sinophobia hosted by National Yang Ming Chiao Tong University (Taiwan), where the French scholar, Alain Brossat, denounced Hongkongese and Taiwanese pro-democracy protesters as ‘cultural renegades’.

Additional information

Funding

The work on this article was supported by JSPS [grant number 19K02530].

Notes on contributors

Edward Vickers

Edward Vickers holds the UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship at Kyushu University, Japan. He writes on the history and politics of education in contemporary Asia, as well as on public history and identity politics. He is the co-author (with Zeng Xiaodong) of Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017) and (with Mark R. Frost and Daniel Schumacher) of Remembering Asia's World War Two (2019). He is President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia, and a core member of the War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership (WARMAP).