Toward an Analytical Framework of Studying the Political Context and Content of Education Reform

This chapter reviews the literature on Hong Kong's education reform. While the British colonial rulers liberalized and decentralized education reform to the local civil service, the post-1997 government gradually centralized education reform but failed in 2012, when the national education policy was opposed by the civil society. The rise of localism from 2012 to 2019 led to Beijing's decision to centralize education reform in its own hands and, as this book will show, to re-politicize the reform content in a far more nationalistic way than before.