University of Warwick Undergraduate Research Support Scheme
Image via Flickr by Josh Delp
Background of My Research
Hong Kong, officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, was a British colony from 1841 to 1997. Although it is just 0.7 times as big as London, it occupies a unique place in the history of the British Empire. It was the only colony with a higher GDP per capita than that of Britain by the end of colonial rule, and there was no political movement overthrowing British rule. Hong Kong’s economic success and social stability seemed to be “part of the natural order.”[1]
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(Image via Flag the the World)
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When I was studying in secondary school In Hong Kong few years ago, I witnessed the strong shock of politics to education. Classes were suspended under large-scale protests; a question of the History public exam paper was cancelled because of being “politically incorrect”; and ‘Liberal Studies’, a subject promoting critical thinking on politics and citizenship, was officially axed.
The second half of the 20th century was known as the golden era of Hong Kong history, marked by a boom of prosperity and social welfare like public housing and free primary education. Inspired by the socio-political changes in Hong Kong in recent years, I started to review the history of Hong Kong’s education – why was education accessible to the public all of a sudden? To what extent was education politicised behind this glamourous and affluent façade?
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This research studies how the British government justified its counter-communist educational policies between the end of WW2 to the 1970s. It needed to cope with the growing communist threat and protect its reputation as a democracy government at the same time.
[1] Judith M. Brown, Rosemary Foot, ‘Introduction: Hong Kong Transition’, in Hong Kong’s Transitions, 1842–1997, edited by Judith M. Brown and Rosemary Foot (United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), p.1.
Introduction: Politics & Education
Education is never free from politics. Scholars like Michael Apple have argued that schools help ruling groups promote their preferred values and norms to consolidate social control.[2] Every composition of the education system, including the curriculum and textbooks in schools, is an extension of the existing power relation.
Hong Kong is not an exception.
As a British colony located in southern China, Hong Kong became a front line between the communist and capitalist blocs after the Cold War broke out. Education was in particular a battlefield. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) set up different leftist teachers’ associations, student agents, and roughly 800 schools in Hong Kong, while the British government promoted the benevolence of democracy in schools.[3]
Then, the British government was caught in a dilemma – how to suppress the growth of communist education without attacking the British ideal of freedom of thought?
Historians like Flora L. F. Kan and Michael Ng have studied the tension between the CCP and the British government in education. However, they did not explore how the British government dealt with such an embarrassing position with archival research.
Therefore, I visited the National Archive in London and studied numerous primary sources, mainly of the Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office records. This research aims to study the rhetoric the colonial government used to protect the good name of British democracy, which is its ‘art of justification’.
[2] Lau Chui Shan, ‘Alternative State Formation in Colonial Hong Kong: Patriotic Schools, 1946-1976’, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2014), pp.390, 394.
[3] Michael Ng, Political Censorship in British Hong Kong: Freedom of Expression and the Law (1842–1997) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp.59, 63, 67.
