Lai Pak-sang and Michael Byram's Re-Shaping Education for Citizenship: Democratic National Citizenship in Hong Kong is a recent addition to the body of literature on the challenge of citizenship education in Hong Kong as the Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China adjusts to the implementation of “one country, two systems.” It may appeal to the followers of that literature as well as others who are interested in broader issues of democratization, nationalism and national identity, and postcoloniality in the Chinese context.
The book claims to be based on ethnographic data – including participant observation, classroom observation, interviews with teachers and students, and documents – collected from a Catholic secondary school in Hong Kong from 2002 to 2004. Within the literature on Hong Kong citizenship education, this case study is a relatively unique approach. The overall aim of the book is to show how this one school tries to navigate the complexity of educating students for national citizenship in a socialist China led by the Chinese Communist Party when their own more liberal local society is undergoing gradual democratization. Within this general aim, the book attempts to address several more specific questions related to what this Hong Kong school's students learn about citizenship and national identity, how the notion of China is taught to students, what the school's civic education programme entails with particular regard to questions of democracy and national identity, to what extent the school's citizenship education adheres to the SAR government's guidelines, and more broadly, how theories of nationalism may contribute to our understanding of these issues. All of these questions are couched within a framework that sees citizenship education in the school as within the process of nation-building in Hong Kong.
In exploring these questions, Lai and Byram also attempt to make several arguments. First, the national education carried out in Hong Kong schools is distinct from that of the rest of China in the nature of the nationalism promoted. Second, a learner-centred approach dominates in the democratic national education process. Third, the school's civic education programme appears to present a competition among different values, especially democracy and nationalism. Fourth, theories of nationalism can help to enhance our understanding of Hong Kong's national education as distinct from that in schools in other parts of China. Fifth, the school's citizenship education aims are oriented around plurality and diversity rather than homogeneity and uniformity. The final argument is that the school's teachers and students interpret the Chinese nation in terms of territoriality and ethnicity.
The presentation of these arguments and answers to the research questions proceeds first through a brief discussion of the Hong Kong citizenship education context and a review of relevant studies of citizenship education in Hong Kong, mainland China, and other Asian societies. The book then turns to a presentation of the empirical findings from the ethnographic study of Long River School, focusing on published plans of the school's civic education group and interviews with students. The findings are then interpreted within a framework derived from theories of nationalism, drawing largely from the work of Anthony Smith and Benedict Anderson. Before concluding, the authors present a chapter comparing citizenship education in Hong Kong and Singapore. Throughout, the book devotes considerable text to exploring the complex theoretical and empirical manifestations of concepts 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, pluralism and others.
The greatest potential strength of the book, its basis on an ethnographic study of a Catholic school, is unfortunately relatively untapped. The little data that is presented appears mainly in the form of a list of the planned civic education activities and selected quotations from students, but without the depth and richness readers might expect from an ethnography – less than one-third of the book is devoted to presentation of the empirical data. Much of the rest of the book is rather repetitive, anecdotal and confusing, leaving the reader struggling to understand what overall argument is being made. There are numerous generalizations based on the voices of a few students, as well as interpretations and conclusions unsupported by the data and therefore rather unconvincing. At the expense of a more thorough presentation of the implementation and meaning of citizenship education in the school is a long chapter less-than-successfully attempting to link very macro-level theories of nationalism with the specific case of one school's citizenship education programme and the views of some students. Unfortunately the effort is again unconvincing both in using theory to interpret data and in using data to inform theory.
For these reasons, this reviewer considers that this book does not make a significant contribution to Chinese studies, and would not be of much use for teaching, although it does offer some anecdotal insight into citizenship education in Hong Kong.
