The purpose of civic education is to prepare students to become ‘good citizens’ aligned with the policies and political purposes of the regime to which they belong. This exploratory study employed a mixed methods design to construct a typology of ‘good citizens’ to understand university students’ perceptions of citizenship in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau and Mainland China. It found that the university students’ perceptions of ‘good citizens’ is constructed from two components: internal political efficacy and the connection between ‘good citizens’ and the regime. Students in these societies share a similar understanding of the first component but have significant divergences in the second component. These findings demonstrate a correlation between regime type and the perceptions of ‘good citizens’ and our typology could provide a conceptual framework to guide researchers in organising and conducting further comparative studies. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

This article examines the intertwining and evolution of neoliberal and nationalist discourses in post-colonial Hong Kong and Macao, arguing that their combination reveals the dual layers of political rationality in the dynamics of higher education policymaking. It suggests a move towards governmentality with Chinese characteristics, marked by gradual and continuous shifts towards decolonisation and re-Sinicisation within the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework. This perspective contrasts with existing literature on Hong Kong that emphasises the maintenance of the colonial status quo and points out abrupt changes due to the 2019 protests and the 2020 National Security Law. By analysing the reconfiguration of governmentality in the higher education systems of these post-colonial Chinese societies amid changing political landscapes, the article sheds light on both the incremental changes and significant moments influencing the trajectory of higher education development in Hong Kong and Macao. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

This article provides an overview of the politics of education as they affect regions and communities on the periphery of the People's Republic of China. Drawing on the articles in this special issue of Comparative Education, it analyses tensions related to the attempted imposition of Bejing's homogenising and totalising vision of Chineseness across Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Hong Kong, Taiwan and amongst the mainland's migrant underclass. Also considered here are the politics of comparative educational scholarship, as they relate to a widespread failure to engage critically with the diversity and complexity of Chinese societies. Attributable largely to the West's own 'culture wars', this failure betrays much-touted ethical commitments to social justice and anti-'hegemonic' resistance. It is thus a central purpose of this essay - and special issue - to urge educational scholars to interrogate the politics of oppression and injustice in China and elsewhere 'beyond the Western horizon'. Copyright ©2024 Routledge.

Numerous studies have noted the difficulties in promoting a common national identity curriculum due to increasing tension between the concepts of local autonomy and national cohesion. Hong Kong’s promotion of Moral and National Education provides an interesting case to examine two aspects of this tension – what national identity education goals can be selected when local people enjoy different rights, and how local education agents can select content and pedagogy to address such goals. This article analyses two sample textbook lessons, two teachers’ teaching plans for this subject, and memos from related curriculum development meetings. The comparisons reveal that textbook adaption is a consistent and important part of teacher-textbook interaction, with three major patterns emerging from Hong Kong teachers’ interactions with textbooks. These can be attributed to the influence of micro- and macro-level powers over teacher-textbook interactions in Moral and National Education. Copyright ©2024 Routledge .

In recent years, governments worldwide have been committed to promoting global citizenship education, hoping to expand students’ worldviews and enhance their participation in world affairs. Therefore, the researchers tried to apply picture book teaching in the world citizenship education course, allowing students to cultivate world citizen literacy by reading picture books themed on world issues and participating in related classroom activities. This study is a case study. The researcher analyses diverse qualitative data, including student assignments, student interviews, teacher observation logs and questionnaire surveys. There are two research questions: (1) The application of picture book teaching in global citizenship education, middle school What is the learning process and outcomes of the students? (2) How does picture book teaching apply to global citizenship education, and what is the cultivation of junior high school students’ world citizenship literacy? The study results found that after participating in teaching picture books and applying them to the world citizenship education course, students can understand world problems and their responsibilities as world citizens. At the same time, through different learning activities, students can develop their awareness of caring for the people of the world and build up the spirit of “caring for the world”. Finally, the researchers make recommendations based on the research results for the reference of global citizenship education curriculum designers. Copyright ©2024 社團法人中華民國學校行政研究學會.

Teaching young Hongkongers a sense of ‘Chineseness’, especially in a cultural sense, was embedded in the city’s colonial history. Yet moulding the young generation to be patriotic citizens of the People’s Republic of China was a new objective for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government after 1 July 1997. This study analyses civic and citizenship curriculum guidelines issued in Hong Kong from 1997 to 2022 to explore how a new construct of national identity was pedagogized in the post-handover context. The research findings of this study suggest that the pedagogical discourse of national identity in the curriculum guidelines has tended to prioritize an ethno-cultural sense of Chineseness as an external entity and orient Hong Kong students as passive recipients for this new identity after the handover. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for the teaching of national identity in Hong Kong’s new political context after the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020. Copyright © 2024 Intellect Ltd Article. English language.

This narrative study explored pre-service teachers’ critical learning experiences in Hong Kong during the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement and how these experiences transformed their perspectives on the teaching profession. Forty pre-service teachers participated in the study, including 16 local participants and 24 originally from mainland China. Using Jarvis’s transformative learning model, this study identified four categories of narratives: society-centred, person-centred, relation-centred, and witness-lens narrative accounts. These narratives demonstrated the participants’ various approaches during the transformation process, including reflection, emotion, and self-identification. Changes resulting from these experiences varied from radical perspective-taking to no change occurring. The Hong Kong locals mainly presented society-centred narrative accounts, whereas the majority of participants from mainland China reported person-centred narrative accounts. Their varied previous lifeworld experiences and self-identification explained the differences. The present study highlights the importance of including emotion and identity instead of taking a single constructive perspective when explaining the process of transformative learning. In addition, it shows that the process and outcomes of transformation do not naturally follow a positive direction of growth. Future studies should examine teacher’s transformation using a narrative approach and longitudinal design. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s).

As Philosophy for Children (P4C) is increasingly favored as an educational approach in other regions, the absence of P4C in traditional schools in Hong Kong raises controversy regarding its benefits for Hong Kong students. This paper investigates the potential of implementing P4C in Hong Kong by exploring the features of values education in Hong Kong primary schools. The study employs Stake’s curriculum evaluation model for systematic evaluation and suggests that P4C helps bridge the gap between the Intended Curriculum and the Observed Curriculum in the Transactions and Outcomes aspect, addressing the shortcomings of Moral and Civic Education (MCE). This study discusses the possibility of using the P4C approach for values education by comparing P4C and MCE educational principles, pedagogies, and learning outcomes. The two share similarities, indicating the possibility of integrating P4C into values education. Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). 

This study highlights the role of educators in the resistance to Hong Kong's National Security Education (NSE) amidst waves of political repression in the wake of the anti-extradition movement of 2019-2020. Education reforms, teacher training and student assessment used to cultivate students' creativity, critical thinking and independent thinking skills. NSE, which emphasises China's perspective of knowledge construction, has contradicted long-standing pedagogies of teaching and learning. The research questions are: How do politically liberal educators navigate these changes? Do they conform and/or resist? Based on the study of social media and interviews with 22 politically liberal former and current teachers, school librarians, educators in public organisations and professors of teacher training programmes, I find that beneath the public transcripts of compliance in schools, there is a repertoire of 'winning quietly' among educators in Hong Kong by training students' 'civil society competence' using less politically sensitive issues, working perfunctorily on NSE-related tasks, using metaphors, jokes and prayers to convey hidden messages, and allowing students to engage in resistance. Classrooms and private online groups remain the third space for atomised resistance. Outside Hong Kong, educators openly counter the ideological influence under NSE both individually and collectively, enabling an alternative to NSE that can reach students in Hong Kong. This study illuminates that authoritarian governments never fully control the stage, and it is too soon to tell whether their attempts to create obedient citizens will prevail. Copyright ©2023 Sage Publications Ltd.