The new school year began this week in Hong Kong with a significant new addition to the curriculum for some students: the teachings of Xi Jinping Thought.
The changes come alongside more lessons about national security and pro-Beijing patriotism, as the influence and control of China’s ruling Communist party increases in the semi-autonomous city.
The teachings on the ideology of China’s leader are encased in a new subject now mandatory for secondary students, Citizenship, Economics and Society, first announced in 2022.
The new module instils “patriotic education” for all three years of secondary students, and its content is aimed at “cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity”, according to government-issued curriculum guidelines. Third form students are expected to learn about Xi Jinping Thought in a module on “our country’s political structure and participation in international affairs”. The guidelines recommend teachers spend 12 40-minute lessons on the module.
The guidelines said some schools had been urged to implement pilot programmes of the new subject in 2023, but that all 512 secondary schools should be running the new curriculum from Monday 2 September 2024.
Writing on social media, one Hong Kong resident likened the new curriculum to “brainwashing”.
“To say that education distorts minds is putting it mildly,” they added.
Another Hong Kong resident associated the new curriculum with concerns about the “mainlandisation” of Hong Kong.
“When I meet students on the street, I hear them chatting in Mandarin, and they also use Chinese terms, and even their eating habits have been China-cised,” said one.
“If we add the news media and the government’s patriotic education, we will probably see the disappearance of the real Hong Kong people in my lifetime.”
Changes to primary school education were announced in late 2023. The education bureau said general studies programs for primary students would be replaced by a new curriculum by 2025. New teachings would include national security, and the opium war and Japan’s invasion of China, two key events in Beijing’s narrative of a “century of humiliation”, a driver of China’s increasing nationalism.
Xi’s personal political philosophy, officially called “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era”, was enshrined in China’s constitution in 2018. In 2021 it was introduced into mainland Chinese schools. The Xi teachings in the mainland curriculum appear on available information to be far more comprehensive that those introduced to Hong Kong. However it has still sparked alarm among some parents and citizens.
Hong Kong school enrolments have declined sharply in recent years, driven by low birthrates and an exodus of residents and expats in the wake of the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement and the imposition of tighter, pro-CCP social controls.