Teaching national identity in post-handover Hong Kong: Pedagogical discourse and re-contextualization in the curriculum

Teaching young Hongkongers a sense of ‘Chineseness’, especially in a cultural sense, was embedded in the city’s colonial history. Yet moulding the young generation to be patriotic citizens of the People’s Republic of China was a new objective for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government after 1 July 1997. This study analyses civic and citizenship curriculum guidelines issued in Hong Kong from 1997 to 2022 to explore how a new construct of national identity was pedagogized in the post-handover context. The research findings of this study suggest that the pedagogical discourse of national identity in the curriculum guidelines has tended to prioritize an ethno-cultural sense of Chineseness as an external entity and orient Hong Kong students as passive recipients for this new identity after the handover. The article concludes by considering the implications of these findings for the teaching of national identity in Hong Kong’s new political context after the implementation of the National Security Law in 2020.