The Educational Implications of Hong Kong’s new National Security Law – Talk by Prof. Edward Vickers

The implications of Hong Kong’s National Security Law (NSL), which came into force in July 2020, are still being worked out in many spheres - not least education. During the protests of 2019-2020, schools and universities were widely blamed by 'patriots' for fomenting sedition among Hong Kong youth. In the aftermath of those protests, the NSL mandated an educational overhaul designed to ensure the inculcation of loyalty to China’s Communist regime.

In this talk, Prof. Vickers will discuss various measures introduced under the auspices of the NSL, and how these have been justified by the authorities and by 'patriotic' voices locally and on the mainland. He argues that Hong Kong’s cultural distinctiveness has in fact never been acknowledged by Beijing, and that this partly explains the tensions bedevilling Hong Kong-mainland relations. The latest legal and educational measures go further than ever in delegitimating any meaningful conception of ‘Hongkongese’ distinctiveness. Rather than assuaging conflict and tension, this is likely to entrench and exacerbate alienation and resentment.

Hong Kong's experience also reflects a broader pattern in the CCP's dealings with restive populations on its borders (e.g. in Xinjiang) and in the role assigned to education in propagating a monolithic, neotraditionalist and strongly Han-centric vision of 'Chineseness'. Under the NSL, Hong Kong has thus been drawn into a wider securitisation of education in contemporary China that highlights the colonial (or neocolonial) features of CCP governance. These recent developments in China also underline the narrow eurocentrism of the outlook, widely prevalent today in the field of educational studies, that equates 'coloniality' with Western culture, or 'hegemony' with Western dominance.

About the speaker

Edward Vickers is Professor of Comparative Education at Kyushu University in Japan, where he also holds the UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship. He researches the history and politics of education in contemporary East Asia, especially in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the mainland PRC, as well as the relationship between heritage and identity politics in East Asian societies. He is author (with Zeng Xiaodong) of Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017), and co-editor of Remembering Asia's World War Two (2019). He is currently President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia.