Central to the debates on the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty is how this process has affected change in the policy process and policy outputs. Many see policy change as a result of the evolving political environment in Hong Kong following the political transition. This article, however, adopts the notion of policy networks and argues that the analysis of policy change cannot be reduced to a simple contextual stimulus – the policy alteration model. A case study – 'the development of civic education' – demonstrates the importance of policy networks, as a particular structure of government and group relations in decision making, in explaining the course of policy change. It is apparent that the relationship between regime change and political liberalization, on the one hand, and established networks, on the other, tends to be complex and dialectical in Hong Kong. Despite the importance of sovereignty transition and political restructuring, the effect of contextual factors on public policy greatly depends on the nature of the network involved.
[Copyright of Pacific Review is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09512740601133245 ]

The purpose of this paper is to describe the Hong Kong (HK) school curriculum, especially the general curriculum for civic education and other social subjects, in relation to the political events of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, the 1989 Tiananmen Square Incident, and the return of HK's sovereignty from the United Kingdom (UK) to the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1997. This paper will argue that since 1984, the school curriculum of HK has been marked by tensions brought about by political cultures shaped by the UK and the PRC, the bureaucratic mechanisms of which are used to make sure that those curriculum contents that are judged to be politically correct are taught in school. Over the last two decades the school curriculum has been depicted as being shaped by the emergence of the nation-state and the transfer of sovereignty. Granted that political and national education forms part of the school culture, the question of how to shape students to be patriotic through the curriculum will continue to be contentious.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300701289045]

The debate in Hong Kong over which language (Cantonese, Mandarin or English) should be used as the teaching medium in publicly funded educational institutions predates the city's transition from colony to Special Administrative Region in 1997. In the past nine years it has been presented as the cornerstone of the ongoing educational reform process. This paper argues that the issue has become increasingly ideologically motivated since the end of the colonial period, and identifies two factors contributing to the decisionmaking process in Hong Kong: the role of outside vested interests in educational policymaking and the shortfall in specific language teaching expertise. Against the complex background of Hong Kong's official language policy of 'trilingualism and biliteracy', the paper shows how educational policymakers are constrained by these factors and prevented from engaging in substantive educational language planning as a starting point for root-and-branch reforms, and how this may have led them to commission research to support pre-existing executive decisions. The study analyses official statements and policy documents on the medium of instruction issue, in combination with observations of the current situation in publicly funded secondary schools, in an attempt to indicate future directions for Hong Kong.
[Copyright of Language and Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.2167/le633.0]

This article examines the evolution of language-in-education policy in Hong Kong during the first six decades of British rule (1842-1902). In particular, it analyses the changing roles and status of the English and Chinese languages during this formative period in the development of the colony's education system. The textual and statistical data presented in the article provide a corrective to the claim that the British imposed English on their colonial subjects and in the process rode roughshod over the indigenous languages. The evidence suggests that Hong Kong's education system provided opportunities for native students to attend purely Chinese schools, purely English schools or mixed-medium schools. Although the British apparently attached more importance to English teaching, they were generally at pains to emphasise that English should not be studied at the expense of Chinese. The findings indicate that language policy (be it Chinese or English in orientation) was always tied in some way to Britain's political and economic interests in the region.
[Copyright of Journal of Educational Administration and History is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00220620600984214]