School of Education

Wednesday 23 February 2022, 16:00-17:00

Room 213 St Andrew's Building, 11 Eldon Street, Glasgow G3 6NH

One country, one system, one culture: the educational implications of Hong Kong’s new National Security Law

The implications of Hong Kong’s National Security Law (NSL), which came into force in July 2020, are still being worked out in many spheres of life in this ‘Special Administrative Region’ of the People’s Republic of China. Education has been a major focus of measures relating to the new law. During the protests of 2019-2020, schools and universities were widely blamed by the mainland and pro-Beijing press for fomenting seditious sentiment among Hong Kong youth. In the aftermath of those protests, the NSL has mandated an overhaul of school curricula and educational governance designed to ensure the inculcation of patriotism and absolute loyalty to China’s Communist regime. In this paper, I discuss the measures that have been introduced under the auspices of the NSL, and how these have been presented or justified by the authorities. I argue that Hong Kong’s cultural distinctiveness has in fact never been acknowledged by Beijing, and that this partly explains the chronic tension that has bedevilled Hong Kong-mainland relations. The latest legal and educational measures go further than ever before in delegitimating any conception of ‘Hongkongeseness’ as a distinctive form of Chineseness, seeking instead to represent Hongkongers as sharing in a monolithic Han identity. Rather than assuaging conflict and tension within Hong Kong society and with the mainland authorities, this is likely only to entrench and exacerbate alienation and resentment. More broadly, these recent developments, set alongside the wider securitisation of education in contemporary China (e.g. in Xinjiang), highlight the distinctly colonial (or neocolonial) character of Chinese governance, highlighting the narrow eurocentrism of the outlook, widely prevalent today, that equates 'coloniality' with Western culture.

About the speaker

Edward Vickers is Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University in Japan, where he also holds the UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship. He researches the history and politics of education in contemporary East Asia, especially in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland PRC, as well as the relationship between heritage and identity politics in East Asian societies. He is author (with Zeng Xiaodong) of Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017), and co-editor of Remembering Asia's World War Two (2019). He is currently President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia.

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First published: 24 January 2022