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Back to School in the NSL Era|Dr Jack Kwan Chi-pong

蘋果日報 2020/09/03 12:51


This fall will see the first cohort of Hong Kong students pursuing their studies under new teaching guidelines promulgated by the city’s education bureau. Understandably, the guidelines are meant to raise the awareness of national security among students and to strengthen the supervision of schools to safeguard national security, as required respectively by Articles 10 and 9 of the national security law (NSL) enacted just two months ago. Also underway are a plan to revamp the teaching of liberal studies as a compulsory subject in the Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) and a review on textbooks to ensure conformity of their contents to the provisions of the NSL, which criminalizes the acts of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers.
This new wave of education overhaul came shortly after chief executive Carrie Lam used a demeaning metaphor--”chicken coop without a roof”--to mock her city’s secondary education program as one that only invites “false and biased information” to descend upon students. Notably, students account for 40% of some 9,000 arrests stemming from various demonstrations over a year of civil disobedience. An even larger number of students found themselves on the streets chanting pro-democracy slogans, forming human chains and demanding social liberties in the past school year. Seeing this scale of student involvement in the year-long protests, Lam vowed to impose stricter education controls as her government’s first order of business.

The Hunt for “Bad Apples”

Lam’s calls for a politics-free campus was echoed by John Lee Ka-chiu, the city’s security secretary who oversees the infamous police force. With no education background whatsoever, Lee called for “tighter management” of schools to get rid of their “bad apples,” in reference to those “unprofessional” teachers he saw as “poison” to the young minds. A few months earlier, state-run Xinhua News Agency issued a commentary on social media asserting that students under Hong Kong’s education system are being “poisoned,” in response to a DSE history exam question asking whether “Japan did more good than harm to China in the period 1900-45.” That question was later stricken out from the exam at the request of the education bureau.
The hunt for “bad apples” was soon escalated after a series of city-wide protests first erupted one year ago when Lam tried to pass an extradition bill amid opposition. Since then, the education bureau has opened cases against nearly 200 teachers, many of whom were penalized for simply posting comments against the doomed extradition bill on their private social media accounts. Incidentally, some of those posts were shared online by pro-Beijing groups as a means for inciting anonymous complaints to the bureau. In a further attempt to add fuel to the fire, former chief executive Leung Chun-ying launched a website to offer a cash bounty for tip-offs on teachers who voice their political stances to students.
As a bid to depoliticize schools, education secretary Kevin Yeung Yun-hung wrote letters to all primary and secondary school principals warning them not to allow teachers and students to participate in any political events, such as boycotting classes. For rulebreakers, the education bureau urges the school administration to take stringent disciplinary actions and follow-ups. Teachers whose “misconducts” are deemed serious enough would have their licenses voided by the bureau. Parents are also informed by way of letters from school leaders that “class boycotts and propaganda of all sorts” should be stayed away from school with the enforcement of NSL and the National Anthem Ordinance. Earlier, the bureau advised schools to call the police in case of incidents where students or teachers are found to insult China’s national anthem. It is expected that the bureau would instruct schools to seek help from the police in enforcing NSL on campus.

Textbook Narratives

Aside from targeting teachers, Lam’s government has also stepped up its censorship effort on teaching materials. Per the education bureau’s order, schools are now required to identify in their curricula any books whose contents fall short of complying with the provisions of the NSL. The bureau has also set up a consultation service team to give advice to publishers on amending textbooks. Consequently, this year’s textbooks for liberal studies are found missing the phrase “separation of powers,” a western constitutional concept that Xi Jinping resolutely denounces.
Meanwhile, at least two classical passages are expected to be removed from this year’s DSE Chinese exam. One of them, “On the Six Fallen States” written by master essayist Su Xun in the Song dynasty, examines the strategies deployed by the State of Qin in defeating the other six warring states before unifying China in 221 B.C. The ground on which this passage is taken off remains unclear. Perhaps, upon reading the masterpiece, a student may conceive a counter strategy to defy being unified by an overwhelming nation, thereby falling afoul of the secession clauses of the NSL.

Propaganda disguised as Education

Over the past few years, Lam and her cabinet members have ruthlessly turned Hong Kong’s once well-established education system into an ideological battleground for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to advance its patriotic and nationalistic narratives. Among them are the Party’s official interpretations of Chinese history in the context of foreign invasions and the phenomenal successes achieved by China’s socialist modernization and centralized democracy. Increasingly, students and teachers are told to take those narratives at face value, with absolutely no room for discussion, let alone criticism, as is the case of the controversial DSE history exam question. Such pedagogical practice is soon to become the norm, particularly when more patriotic education programs are on the way, as mandated by the NSL. Notably, such patriotic programs are nothing like those that prevail in the Western civilizations. Instead, the core element of the Chinese patriotism is unquestionable loyalty to the ruling Party, with the goal of producing “future generations so thoroughly indoctrinated that they will ‘inherit red genes’ of loyalty to the CCP,” according to the State’s guidelines on patriotic education. It is yet to be seen whether Hong Kong’s guidelines on patriotic education would resemble the State’s ones.
As this new school year begins, Hong Kongers should signal clearly to the world that we stand to protect our younger generation and uphold one of their most basic rights to education, not to propaganda. As we are all born as freethinking spirits, none of our minds should be controlled. Students of all levels should be set free from ideological confinements so that they are capable of discerning right from wrong, as opposed to calling a deer a horse.
(Dr Jack Kwan Chi-pong, MIT-trained consultant based in Boston)
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