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This article aims to generate a better understanding of Hong Kong teachers’ perception of national education as implemented in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (hereafter referred to as Hong Kong SAR) and the interrelationship between their perception and the methods they adopt to teach the topic. We outline the Hong Kong context relevant to our research and review the relevant literature to consider typologies and teaching methods about and for national education. Questionnaire data focused on the seven typologies of nationalism and the three teaching methods of national education identified in the literature review. A total of 601 questionnaires were returned from 198 schools. The typologies of cultural nationalism, civic and peripheral nationalism, authoritarian nationalism, unification nationalism and cosmopolitan nationalism, and the teaching methods of group discussion and an affective approach characterize the views of Hong Kong secondary school teachers about national education. We suggest that teachers’ diverse views about nationalism and their varied use of teaching methods to achieve their goals suggest the powerful influence of current initiatives from the Chinese mainland and the need to reflect on established academic literature that proposes the decolonization of the curriculum and interactive and critical teaching methods.

Declining employment prospects of graduates have been reported in the international literature and in Hong Kong. This casts doubts on the ‘employability’ of graduates of an expanding higher educati...

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the strategic role of world-class universities and the international academic profession in the regionalisation project of China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA). It illustrates the way in which the case of the GBA regionalisation project offers a potentially rich empirical example for adding contextual understanding to the literature of the Triple Helix model, which largely draws on inductive theorising from western successful innovation cases. The GBA regionalisation processes will provide a wealth of empirical cases for identifying circumstances that address tensions and increase interactions in the Triple Helix relationship of university, government and industry for fostering knowledge synergies.Design/methodology/approachFocusing on the case of Hong Kong, it engages in policy and stakeholder analysis and addresses three key research questions: What are the competitive advantages and potential strategic role of Hong Kong's universities and academic profession in the regionalisation of innovation systems in the GBA? What is the role of the governments in the regionalisation processes? What are the expected opportunities and challenges offered by the GBA policy initiatives for the future development of Hong Kong’s universities and academic profession?FindingsHong Kong, given its status as an international finance centre and global city with intense internationalisation and established judicial system operated by the rule of law, will contribute to the GBA development by leveraging on its edge in scientific research and development and international networks of academic research through the world-class academic profession. Scientists and researchers in the city, possessing the competitive advantages of basic research and international partnerships, are highly regarded by the central government. The engagement of Hong Kong’s scientific talents, can play an important role in achieving China’s aspiration of becoming a global technology power.Research limitations/implicationsAnalysis of this article implies that the GBA concept is currently China’s ambitious but vague economic plan. The opportunities in which key node cities and knowledge/ innovation clusters will capture and capitalise from the regional ‘co-opetitive” ’entrepreneurial ecosystem are still unclear. The future of the GBA regionalisation is so dynamic and open-ended that grounded concepts related to the governance innovation/ discourse of ‘one country two systems’ and social connectedness and capitalisation with Chinese characteristics will help in making sense of the contextualisation of a Chinese regional innovation system and enhancing the sophistication of reconceptualisation of the Triple Helix model.Originality/valueThis article will add to the literature some novel contextualised knowledge about the GBA’s potential triple-helix relationship between government-university-industry in the 21st century. The empirical example of China’s GBA will also shed light on a new understanding of the role of international social capital in the entrepreneurial knowledge economy, dynamics between basic and applied research, and a synergistic interface between regionalisation and national innovation system.

In the existing literature of knowledge exchange (KE) and higher education, there is limited but emerging cluster of research which undertakes a comprehensive analysis of various types of h...

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to highlight the urgent need for a genuinely effective and attainable citizenship education model in Hong Kong’s schools, which focusses on promoting student participation in school governance. It is an empirical citizenship education management model for school leaders that illustrates the predictive effects of personally responsible, participatory, justice-oriented and patriotic citizenship, necessarily supported by school management practices, school ethos and teacher beliefs.Design/methodology/approachA total of 3,209 students from 51 secondary schools in Hong Kong participated in a quasi-experimental design questionnaire survey. A structural equation model (SEM) was applied to confirm the model.FindingsThe results of the SEM show that the values and cultural practices held by a school’s teachers drive the implementation of its citizenship education. Moreover, it is well known that organizational values can exert a powerful influence and it is the same within educational structures: management practices in schools have an impact on ethos, teachers’ beliefs and student participation in school governance.Practical implicationsThe paper provides practical proposals for school leaders to create opportunities for student participation in school governance.Originality/valueThis study builds on existing literature and provides school leaders with a practical model for implementing student participation in school governance.

This paper provides a critical account of the role of universities in the development of innovation and technology in Hong Kong.To do so, the paper examines the political economy of Hong Kong’s inn...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which higher education participation is democratized in the entrepreneurial city of Hong Kong by the policy innovation that encompasses internationalization. There is a dearth of empirical studies about transnational education in Hong Kong, except for a few which examine students’ perceptions of transnational education from a user perspective, situated in marketized conditions (Leung and Waters, 2013; Waters and Leung, 2013a, b). The minimal volume of existing research has ignored the innovative aspects of democratizing higher learning by internationalization, namely, the operation of international degrees by overseas universities on offshore campuses. This policy innovation by transnational institutions is significant in an era of the globalization of higher education, as access to higher education cannot be otherwise realized given the local education policies. Design/methodology/approach Employing documentary research, this paper presents and assesses the growth of community college international education at The University of Hong Kong and its unique facets, juxtaposing it with the marketized context of East Asian higher education. It engages in specific reviews surrounding the operational mode and academic collaborations of the international educational programs and practices at the Hong Kong University’s School of Professional and Continuing Education. Findings This documentary research finds that the internationalized academic profession of partner universities enables curriculum design, pedagogy, teaching ideas and assessment methods to be informed by a diversity of international academic cultures and indigenous knowledge. Through this policy innovation, international education is institutionalized in such a way that it takes Hong Kong students beyond the community college context, which is relatively localized. It also illuminates the way in which the “ideoscape” of American community colleges and international partnerships with Australian and British universities have been manifested in the Hong Kong education hub for transnational student flows and intellectual exchanges across the Asian region. Originality/value This paper contributes to the academic literature of higher education studies, particularly in the areas of massification and democratization, as well as their connection with internationalization and policy innovation. It also delineates various forces that are propelling the development of higher education’s internationalization and massification.

This article examines the significance of global trends in higher education (HE) development in Hong Kong between 1997 and 2012. Two trends, massification and internationalisation, are considered key driving forces that shaped Hong Kong’s HE policy during the period. The former refers to government measures to widen participation in HE. The latter is associated with Hong Kong’s regional education hub strategy. Universities in the city revised their governance structure in these contexts. The article first explains why massification and internationalisation entered the HE policy discourse in Hong Kong in the late 1990s, and how they were materialised by neoliberal practices in the 2000s. Subsequently, it reveals how the two trends influenced university governance by examining the development of the University of Hong Kong Group. Based on this review, this article argues that the HE development can be perceived as an extension of structural transformation of the Hong Kong economy.

The International Baccalaureate (IB) has become a powerful educational brand by developing a reputation for combining progressive approaches with academic rigour. This can be identified by the growing number of schools adopting IB programmes globally and especially in the IB Asia-Pacific region. As part of this trend, the IB Middle Years Programme (MYP), aimed at students between 11 and 16 years old, has expanded significantly in recent years. However, in Asia-Pacific, the MYP remains less popular relative to the IB’s Primary Years Programme and pre-university Diploma Programme (DP). This article compares the motivations of IB MYP and DP Coordinators for choosing the MYP in Asia-Pacific with their counterparts in other parts of the world. To achieve this, 175 IB Coordinators across 54 countries were surveyed. Findings revealed that IB pedagogy, holistic approach, philosophy and global citizenship were the most popular reasons to offer the MYP. Yet, IB Coordinators in Asia-Pacific put relatively greater weight on marketing, the MYP Certificate and external validation of school-based assessments. This article argues that this emphasis may stem from a high concentration of schools operating in the private international schooling sector and discusses the potential for the MYP to continue to expand across the Asia-Pacific region.

This chapter discusses how Asian universities respond to the global prevalence of university rankings, which are operated in various form with different emphases. First, it defines the context and rationales of the rise of world university rankings. Next, it compares and contrasts the three dominant university rankings, namely, Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), and Times higher Education University Rankings (THE). After assessing the controversies, limitations and solutions of the dominant ranking systems, we will evaluate the current performance of Asian universities and discuss what lessons are to be learned by Asian universities amid the globalizing forces of world university ranking.