Following the resumption of Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the Hong Kong Government has introduced a new national education project which aims at building nationalism and patriotism. With an active involvement of the state and civil society in promoting national education in recent years, there have been certain drastic changes in the school system - reforms in the curriculum with more weight to national identity and China's topics, more nationalistic or patriotic extra-curricular activities and rituals, and more training for teachers to conduct national education. Informed by a Gramscian notion of hegemony, this paper analyses the advent of and struggles over the national education policy and illustrates the collaboration and contests among various groups in the nation-building project - with the controversies over display of the national flag and liberal studies curriculum as examples.
[Copyright of International Studies in Sociology of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09620210701543908]

This article discusses citizenship education, education policy and discourse to explore their relations with the exercise of power in society. Taking the case of 1990 and 1997 legislative debates on citizenship education policy in Hong Kong, it briefly surveys the substantive arguments favouring or opposing the retention of government controls over politics in schools. It then examines in more detail the discourses used by legislators which constitute students, teachers and the government. This discussion shows that not only does citizenship education represent a power relation between the state and citizens, with policy representative of the power of the state over educational workers, but also that the targets of policy are empowered and disempowered through the strategic use of discourse.
[Copyright of Discourse is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01596300600676144]

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]

Facing the trend and pressure of globalisation, the history curricula of Hong Kong and Shanghai have been undergoing reforms in order to better equip the youth for coping with rapid contextual changes. At the same time, there have been attempts to reposition nationalism in the changing contexts. This paper aims to compare and contrast how the forces of nationalism and globalisation affect, and are re-presented in, the contents of the junior secondary history curricula of the two cities, with a view to exploring the convergent and divergent trends of development in the two systems (capitalist and socialist) within one country. It is expected that the findings will shed light on the continuities and changes in the junior secondary history curricula of the two cities, and explore possible alternatives for the improvement of history education.
[Copyright of Compare: A Journal of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057920601061745 ]

The authors' objectives are to find out the model which most principals thought most favorable in terms of the following: the feasibility of implementation; potential problems envisaged; requirements on resources; grade at which the curriculum was first started; and the extensibility to other grades.