ABSTRACT
Hong Kong’s education has seen remarkable expansion and change in the past two decades. This has been accompanied by numerous policy discussions, mostly provoked by government documents, with the active participation of a wide range of educators. This chapter looks at how and why this occurs in a colony where the polity is still in theory an autocracy. Evidence seems to support the assertion that policymaking in education presents a typical case of how the Hong Kong government has established its own model of legitimacy which sought to compensate for its colonial status. Such a model, however, is at stake as the government has entered the transitional stage, when long-term legitimacy is no longer its concern.
