Contested ontologies of citizenship : critical discourse analysis of citizenship education policies in Hong Kong (2012-2021)

• Main Author: Chan, Wai Leung
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Bristol 2022

Citizenship education policy became a site of contestation between the state and civil society in Hong Kong in 2012. In 2012, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government attempted to introduce the Moral and National Education (MNE) subject, which represented the official version of citizenship for the younger generations of Hong Kong in local schools. This citizenship construction project met with strong opposition from civil society. Drawing on an alternative vision of citizenship, the civic groups resisted the HKSAR Government's plans to establish Citizenship as an official subject on the school curriculum. In this study, I employed the methodology of critical discourse analysis to analyse the official discourse of citizenship education policy and the contesting discourse of the civic groups in the dispute over the MNE policy. Drawing on Charles Taylor's (1995) idea of the ontology of citizenship, I argue that the ontology of citizenship in the official discourse is holist in nature, while the civic groups upheld an atomist ontology of citizenship. The difference in the ontological dimension of citizenship between the state and civil society of Hong Kong represented their fundamental divergence in the conception of citizenship. The contestation between the HKSAR Government and the civic groups in the MNE policy dispute was rooted in these incompatible ontologies of citizenship. I also demonstrate that the HKSAR Government continued to establish official citizenship education based on the holist ontology in subsequent education policies. This culminated in establishing Chinese History as a compulsory subject in the junior secondary curriculum in 2018 and replacing Liberal Studies with Citizenship and Social Development in the senior secondary curriculum in 2021. The thesis concludes with a discussion of an alternative model of citizenship education for Hong Kong schools, informed by the framework of critical citizenship education put forward by Johnson and Morris (2010).