New patriotic curricula, NSL-compliant textbooks, and the purging of liberal studies have transformed Hong Kong’s schools into tools of political indoctrination
The Youngest Targets of the Crackdown
When Beijing imposed the National Security Law on Hong Kong in 2020, it was not only addressing the adults who had protested in the streets. It was addressing the generation that might protest next. The systematic transformation of Hong Kong’s education system – from one that encouraged critical thinking and civic engagement to one designed to produce patriotic loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party – is one of the most consequential and least-discussed dimensions of the post-2020 crackdown.
Children who began primary school in Hong Kong in 2021 are receiving an education that would have been unrecognizable to their parents at the same age. The textbooks have been rewritten. The subjects have been changed. The teachers who raised inconvenient questions have left. And the students who remain have learned – as children always do – to read the room.
The End of Liberal Studies
Liberal Studies was Hong Kong’s most distinctive secondary school subject. Introduced in 2009, it was designed to develop students’ critical thinking skills through engagement with current affairs, civic issues, and social controversies. It was the kind of subject that educated students about how democratic societies function, how to evaluate evidence, and how to form and argue for independent views.
Critics in the pro-Beijing camp had long argued that Liberal Studies was a hotbed of pro-democracy sentiment – that it was producing the very student activists who led the 2014 and 2019 protest movements. After the NSL, the Education Bureau moved swiftly to replace it. Liberal Studies was abolished and replaced with Citizenship and Social Development, a subject built around patriotic education, national identity, and study trips to the mainland designed to give students positive impressions of China’s development.
The subject no longer asks students to evaluate competing political perspectives or form independent judgments about civic controversies. It asks them to appreciate what the party has built and to understand Hong Kong’s place within the national story Beijing wants told.
The Textbook Rewrites
Across all subjects, textbooks were reviewed and revised to ensure compliance with the NSL and with Beijing’s preferred historical narratives. History textbooks had sections on the 1967 Hong Kong leftist riots revised to present the events more sympathetically. References to Hong Kong’s colonial history as a period of democratic development were softened or removed. Discussion of the 2019 protests was framed as social unrest rather than a civic movement.
Geography and social studies texts were updated to reflect Beijing’s territorial claims. Any suggestion that Taiwan operates as an independent political entity, for instance, was removed from materials used in Hong Kong classrooms. The curriculum that once engaged students with the complexity of the world was gradually replaced with one that presents the world through Beijing’s preferred lens.
Freedom House’s 2025 report dedicates significant attention to the education overhaul, documenting how the NSL has been used to reshape not just what is taught but what teachers are allowed to say and what questions students are permitted to ask.
The Purge of Teachers
Teachers who voiced democratic sympathies or who taught materials that could be construed as critical of Beijing faced professional consequences. The Education Bureau introduced new vetting systems and expanded its oversight of teaching materials. The Professional Teachers Union, once one of Hong Kong’s most powerful and respected civic organizations, disbanded in August 2021 under pressure, after state media accused it of being a toxic organization.
The impact on the teaching workforce was immediate and severe. Thousands of teachers emigrated, taking their experience and their institutional memory of pre-NSL education with them. Schools in some districts have reported chronic staff shortages as the combination of emigration and reduced recruitment from overseas depleted the teacher supply.
Those who remain have learned to teach carefully. Politically sensitive topics are avoided. Students who raise challenging questions about current events are gently steered toward safer ground. The classroom, which should be the place where young people learn to think, has become a place where they learn to be quiet.
University Under Pressure
The transformation of primary and secondary education is mirrored at university level. The Education Bureau instructed public universities in 2021 to align their curricula with the NSL and to prevent and suppress on-campus acts that could violate its provisions. Student unions at multiple universities – which had been among the most visible organizational units of the democratic movement – were either disbanded or disaffiliated from their universities, losing institutional support and financial resources.
Academic self-censorship has become widespread. Surveys of academics at Hong Kong universities, conducted by academic freedom monitoring organizations, have consistently found that large majorities report self-censoring on politically sensitive topics. Researchers who study subjects Beijing considers sensitive – including human rights in China, the 1989 Tiananmen events, Taiwan’s political status, or Xinjiang – face informal pressure that shapes what they research, what they publish, and what they say in lectures.
Human Rights Watch has documented cases of academics forced out of positions or denied tenure renewal after publishing work that displeased the political climate, as well as cases of visiting scholars denied entry to Hong Kong due to their research topics.
What Is Being Lost
The long-term consequences of reshaping an entire generation’s education around political loyalty rather than critical thinking are difficult to quantify precisely. But they are not difficult to imagine. Hong Kong’s economic and intellectual distinctiveness rested in large part on the quality of its educational institutions and the independent-minded professionals they produced. Those qualities are not separable from the freedoms that produced them.
A generation educated not to ask questions, not to evaluate political claims critically, and not to engage with the complexity of civic life will not produce the lawyers, journalists, scientists, and civic leaders that made Hong Kong what it was. What it will produce is people prepared for life in a one-party state – which is, of course, precisely the point.
Article 19 has called the transformation of Hong Kong’s education system a fundamental violation of the right to receive and impart information freely, and has called on international educational bodies to maintain pressure on Hong Kong’s government to restore academic freedom and protect students’ rights to an education that serves their development rather than the state’s political requirements.
Ho Yi Lam
Youth Affairs & Education Journalist, Apple Daily UK
Contact: hoyi.lam@appledaily.uk
Ho Yi Lam is a youth affairs and education journalist with professional experience covering student movements, higher education policy, and generational change within Chinese-speaking communities. She received her journalism training at a top-tier Chinese journalism school, where she specialized in education reporting, interview methodology, and media ethics, with an emphasis on public-interest journalism.
Her reporting career includes work with Apple Daily and other liberal Chinese newspapers, producing coverage on campus governance, academic freedom, curriculum reform, and youth civic engagement. Ho Yi’s journalism is grounded in firsthand interviews with students, educators, and policy experts, supported by careful review of official documents and research data.
She has worked in newsroom environments where education reporting intersects with political sensitivity, giving her practical experience in source protection and verification. Editors value her ability to present complex institutional issues clearly while maintaining factual accuracy.
Ho Yi’s authority is built through consistent publication within reputable media outlets and adherence to editorial standards, including transparent sourcing and correction protocols. At Apple Daily UK, she delivers reliable, experience-driven education journalism that informs readers through evidence-based reporting and professional integrity.
