This paper firstly identifies the major legacies inherited by the post-colonial government in Hong Kong, with reference to the key features of access, control and curriculum. Subsequently we examine the state's attempts to reconcile the tension between its quest for legitimacy and for stability. Two dimensions of education, namely, the process of educational policy making and the nature of citizenship promoted through the school curriculum, are analysed respectively in terms of the conceptions of civic participation and identity promoted and implemented by the state. In conclusion we point to the shift in the policy making process and the strengthening of policy actions designed to promote the state's conception of civic identity. (111 words)

The policy of the registration of School

Writers on colonial education have generally assumed that colonial curricula were tools of metropolitan political and cultural 'hegemony'. In particular, it is alleged that colonial history curricula neglected or ignored the histories of indigenous populations. Through analysing the case of Chinese History in Hong Kong, this article demonstrates that these assumptions are highly misleading. Far from exercising 'hegemonical' authority over the school curriculum, the colonial government was to a large extent the prisoner of its local collaborators. For reasons of political as well as educational expediency, in the postwar years the government initiated a conservative Chinese History curriculum to be taught alongside the separate subject of 'History'. Subsequently, a strong Chinese History subject community evolved, who by appealing to nationalist sentiment were able to successfully resist the calls for reform. As a result, efforts by both the colonial and post-colonial administrations to resolve the anomaly of having two history subjects have proved fruitless. (4) Colonialism and the Politics of 'Chinese History' in Hong Kong's Schools schooling during the late colonial period, combined with rapid social and political change and exposure to overseas curricular models, contributed to a decisive shift in the subject culture-from a traditional academic emphasis, towards the promotion of a more skillsbased pedagogy. He therefore argued that the pattern posited by Goodson (1995)-whereby competition among subject communities for status leads inevitably to the adoption of an increasingly academic bent-has been inverted in the case of 'History' in Hong Kong. This article discusses the political influences on the development, in Hong Kong, of the school subject 'Chinese History'-a subject which coexists but is distinct from 'History'. We shall analyse the origins and persistence of this division of history into two separate subjects in the late colonial and post-retrocession periods. We hope to demonstrate and explain why the development of 'Chinese History' has conformed more to the pattern posited by Goodson, than to that identified by Vickers. We will argue that the explanation for this lies principally in the impact on the curriculum of the local political context, and that, in order to understand this context, a re-evaluation of the nature of colonialism in late twentieth century Hong Kong is required. We therefore critically examine prevailing conceptions of the role of colonialism in shaping curriculum policy in Hong Kong, with an emphasis on the significance of the return of sovereignty in 1997.