Abstract
Pak-Sang Lai and Michael Byram’s Re-shaping Education for Citizenship: Democratic National Citizenship in Hong Kong adds to the literature of citizenship education study in Hong Kong after it experienced a change of sovereignty and began re-integration with China as a special administrative region (SAR) in 1997. The authors examine the development of citizenship education under the impact of globalization, nationalization and localization over many years in Hong Kong, and many themes interacting with citizenship such as nationalism, identity, ethnicity, democracy and patriotism are explored.
Apart from an introductory and a concluding chapter, the authors structure this book into seven chapters.
Chapter 2 sets the scene for the school case study by giving a backdrop of school civic education in relation to the citizenship development of Hong Kong before and after 1997, with a major focus on the issues of democracy and national identity in citizenship education.
In Chapter 3, the authors delineate the literature on citizenship education and cases in other developmental states, specifically those with an anti-colonial history in Asia.
Chapters 4 to 6 are devoted to presenting an in-depth account and interpretation of the empirical data observed in a Catholic school. Chapter 6 describes students’ perception of the national education curriculum, particularly how the students evaluate the three civic aims of a local identity, a national identity and a balanced development. Chapter 7 focuses on the ethno-national development of national identity through examining how Chinese nationality is taught in local citizenship education. Chapter 8 carries out a comparative analysis of Hong Kong and Singapore. The authors claim that the comparison can provide an added perspective in examining further their observation and interpretation of the data in the previous chapters, and can also lead to a richer understanding of Hong Kong’s locally produced national ideology and citizenship education, as Singapore primarily implements the collectivist or centralized version of citizenship education and reflects the main trend in citizenship education in Asia – the so-called ‘Asian approach’.
That the school is the focus of study could help to give another dimension to current scholarly works of a macrocosm of citizenship education, in which the nation-state is seen as the unit of study, and education and school are seen as part of the state system in a national study. The school-based study is a close analysis of the processes which are taking place in schools which could be complementary to what is missing in current research on citizenship education in Hong Kong. The case study will add new knowledge and perspectives to school civic education, since previous research studies were largely focused on large-scale quantitative surveys lacking contextual detail on how exactly students learn in a civic education programme.
Within the literature on Hong Kong citizenship education, this case study provides a relatively unique approach in two respects. First, the book is an ethnographic study of a Catholic secondary school in Hong Kong from 2002 to 2004. Second, the authors explore and demonstrate how discourse analysis can lead to insightful analysis on citizenship education and, therefore, convincingly make a novel contribution to socio-political theory.
Despite the strengths of the book mentioned above, Chapters 3 to 5, which present and analyse empirical data from the fieldwork, could have been richer or thicker in their ethnographic description in order to achieve a broader interpretation. The book devotes considerable time to exploring concepts such as those of the developmental state, nationalism, state authoritarianism, values tension, ‘national civility’, ‘localness versus nationality’, democracy, Chinese ethnic consciousness, national patriotism, patriotism without socialism, pan-Chinese nationalism, ethnicity, language, territory, history and pluralism, which are quite repetitive and sometimes confusing for the reader. Also, the attempt that the authors make in using the empirical findings to attest to theory is not very convincing.
All in all, this book could be useful for those who are interested in democratization, nationalism and national identity, and post-coloniality in the Chinese context, as well as for practitioners and students who are interested in educational ethnography from the perspective of discourse analysis.