This article examines how interest groups in Hong Kong have politicised national history, an unpopular school subject, for their own political ends and allied themselves with the PRC against the SAR government and its policy of not making it a single, independent, compulsory core subject in the school curriculum. The article argues that this has been made possible by the 'One country, two systems' administrative structure.
[Copyright of Curriculum Journal is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2011.550764]

This paper explores the construction of local and national identities among secondary school students in post-colonial Hong Kong. As a Chinese society that has undergone a prolonged period of British colonial rule, the reunification of capitalist Hong Kong with the motherland under socialism in 1997 has set the context for a negotiation of identities. It has been revealed that the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has tried to foster a stronger sense of national identity and a sense of belonging among the younger generations through its education reform measures in the new millennium. Nation-building is part and parcel of the reform, although it is being interpreted and implemented diversely by local officials, school principals and teachers. The intersecting and overlapping nature of students' different identities has set the parameters of their identity formation but allows different latitudes of observance and/or choice of different identities.
[Copyright of Asia Pacific Journal of Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02188791.2010.519691]

Hong Kong's school history curriculum is unique worldwide in that it consists of two entirely separate subjects--'History' and 'Chinese History'--which differ not only in content, but also in terms of their pedagogy and their assumptions concerning the nature of history as a discipline. The distinct subject of 'Chinese History' was first created in the 1950s, largely in response to the colonial government's desire to limit the politicisation of local schools. However, there was subsequently little interference by the government in the development of curricula for the 'two histories'. The pattern of curriculum development for history in Hong Kong over the past few decades does not support conventional theories concerning the impact of colonialism on education. On the contrary, it suggests that the relationship of colonialism to curriculum development may in Hong Kong's case be better understood in terms of a mutually convenient collaboration between the government and local educational elites.
[Copyright of Comparative Education is the property of Routledge. Full article may be available at the publisher's website:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03050060120103865]