Hong Kong's cultural policy envisions its citizens living lives celebrated by cultural pursuit, their Chinese-grounded identity enriched by other cultures. Meanwhile, its education policy is a commitment aimed at ensuring that all students are fully prepared to meet the work and life challenges of the future. The two meet via arts education, defined as arts and cultural education and formally recognised as fostering the necessary skills of appreciation, creativity and expression, thereby enabling the cultural literacy of individuals and society to flourish. Supported through policy documents by the relevant bodies, notions of cultural diversity within Hong Kong arts education are addressed and encouraged primarily via the creation and nurturing of partnerships, among the stated emphases being the reinforcement of the existing arts curricula and the establishment of cultural and artistic links between schools and the wider community. Prominent examples include the School Culture Day Scheme, the Arts Experience Scheme for Senior Secondary Students and the Arts Ambassadors-in-School Scheme. However, policy is as much about what is enacted as what is intended. Given the similarity of their rationales, of increasing interest to researchers is the potential for cultural and arts education policies to synergise in ways that can result in the accrual of mutual benefits among the different stakeholders, in turn enabling issues such as cultural participation and consumption, as well as accessibility to cultural education, to be more effectively addressed. This chapter examines the case of Hong Kong in order to reveal the extent to which an arts education policy that suggests possibilities for implementation—as opposed to stating a mandatory approach—is both conceptualised and communicated by its policymakers, together with investigating ways that the arts curriculum is being operationalised by those tasked with its delivery. To this end, the focus is on a series of collaborative

This session could be seen as the regional discussion of ISME Policy Commission in Asia. One of the missions in this commission is ‘to examine and explore issues concerning cultural, education and media policy development and implementation'. As a result, we have invited present and past commissioners, participants, as well as other researcher from various Asian regions to discuss the issue we have encounters pertaining to culture and policy in music education. In addition, other researchers who are interested in this issue are all welcome to join our discussion and commission. European music's autonomy and hegemony has been believed and taken for granted for at least a century, and this tradition based on Western aesthetics has exerted a great influence on music education in Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. However, Asian music traditions differed fundamentally from the music tradition of the West. The European concept of tonality or key functions, for example, was absent from those Asian sound cultures. In this discussion, questions are asked about: 1. Introductions of Euro-American Music into Asian countries. 2. How traditional and folk music in Asia survives. 3. How music educators in Asia should deal with this duplicity. 4. How music educators in Asian develop music education policies for the future. Korea: (Korean traditional music has its name called “gugak,” which literally means ‘national music' but has been relative concept of ‘western music.') Compared to popularity of K-pop music, the number of listeners of gugak has been absurdly small. Music educators suggest that having students experience gugak in school education is the key for traditional music to survive and insist to raise the percentage of covering gugak in statutory curriculum. Although music teachers who are used to western music have difficulty to teach gugak, but the difference between western/ gugak has been the facilitation to broaden the concept of music and enrich the understanding