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The purpose of this paper is to develop a critical analysis of the policy of moral and civic education in the non-tertiary education system in Macao and to examine the kinds of citizens it prepares.

It is a qualitative research design informed by the Foucauldian concepts of “governmentality” and “technology of the self” to analyze the moral and civic education policy in Macao.

The governmentality or art of government of the moral and civic education policy in Macao is made possible by three strategies, namely “governmentalisation of the state,” construction of “moral and civic education as a field of actions” and creation of “social harmony as a new form of civic virtue.” Based on the disclosed governmentalities, three approaches adopted by the government are identified, “normalising the school system,” “educating the students” and “disciplining the scapegoats.” Through these approaches, two technologies of the self are identified, namely disciplinary power and bio-politics, which are used to prepare citizens. In Macao, it seems that there is a tension between the discourses of active democratic citizenship and patriotic education.

The type of policy and theoretical analysis the author has adopted in investigating moral and civic education policy illuminates the local and national policy and, in so doing, creates opportunities for building comparative research on similar issues and their implications for education.

This paper can contribute to the local discussion of the possibility of rewriting the meanings of citizenship.

This paper is comprehensive and can therefore provide a ground for further and future research.

In light of the concerns of declining value education in higher education and the debates on the role of general education in current university setting, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the relation between general education and moral and civic education by examining the effectiveness of a compulsory classics reading general education program in cultivating civic literacy in Asia-Pacific context.

Mixed-method approach in the form of survey assessment and focus group studies was employed to examine the degree of students’ development in abilities and virtues relevant to civic literacy in the course.

Data analyses reveal a promising development on students’ civic literacy in the classics reading general education course. Statistical analysis on surveys indicated students experienced a significant development on democratic skills and critical thinking, acquisition of civic knowledge and cultivation of democratic virtues after taking the course. Focus group analysis illustrated a relation between classics reading and students’ acquisition of knowledge of socio-political institutions, cultivation of open-mindedness and sense of tolerance for diversity and willingness of seeking reasonableness and engaging in social debates.

This paper discusses the successful experience of a newly formulated General Education program in Hong Kong. The program is the first attempt in East Asia to launch values education through the teaching and learning of classics in Asia-Pacific context. This could be an example of launching values education at the level of undergraduate education for other local universities.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the curriculum developments of civic education in three emerging Chinese societies: China and two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao, which are increasingly under the impacts of globalisation in this information world.

The analytical method is used and the following are identified: active and global civic education-related learning units and key themes and main contents in official curriculum guidelines and updated textbooks related to civic education.

A major finding is that elements of both active and global citizenship, such as participation in the community and understanding about the world and thus forming multiple identities, can be found alongside their emphasis on enhancing national citizenship. Thus, ideas of global citizenship and multiple levels of citizenship from local, national to global start to develop in these three Chinese societies.

The implications of such findings of both active and global citizenship, as well as multiple identities, found in these three Chinese societies could be huge for informing civic literature and sociological point of views, in particular, pointing to the next generations receiving a broadened and transcended notion of multiple levels of citizenship, apart from local and national citizenship.

The significance of this paper is that it argues that ideas of active citizenship in terms of community participation and global citizenship have been found in China, Hong Kong and Macao civic education curriculum and textbooks because of the expectations placed on students to compete in a globalized world, though national citizenship and patriotic concerns have been primary concerns. Globalisation makes the world society by impacting on these three Chinese societies for active and global citizenship, though they still retain their particular curricular focusses.

Civic education in Hong Kong is quite confusing nowadays. To understand the policy, it should be placed into the reality of its historical context. In addition, to read through the documentary presentation of policy, the policy’s proposal and its initiation should be understood with an understanding of contextual progress and historical change following the handover of sovereignty to China. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The genealogical knowledge of policy history is applied for the purpose of understanding civic education. The concepts of genealogy put forward present an anti-essentialist position and are opposed to focusing on a singular or dominant ideology.

As the government-dominated power, any knowledge of civic education was bound to be nationally identified and patriotic for the purposes of strengthening nation-state awareness. Another approach of moral education was adopted that emphasized traditional Chinese cultures and values in order to cultivate a recognition of a harmonious society in students.

The paper helps to analyse the government-dominated process of knowledge formation in a value setting.

After the handing over of Hong Kong sovereignty from 1997 and under the “one country two systems” model, the Special Administrative Region's Government initiated new policies of civic education and amended or ignored the old ones. However, it was not until May 2011 that the complete new policy paper was introduced for consultation and then it was passed and issued as national education in April 2012. This article aims to analyze the civic education policy of Hong Kong in the transfer of power after the handing over in the following 15 years.

This policy analysis describes the preparations for Hong Kong’s future citizens and masters. Theories of citizenship education are adopted for this analysis. Moreover, theories of the state are also applied for more in‐depth understanding. These concepts are helpful to operationalize the contents of the study. It was a historical and comparative method to help to understand and explain the civic education policy of the HKSAR's governance.

Basically, it can be seen that the policies are anticipatory and responsive. The historical context of Hong Kong helped to make the correspondence with how the government expected to mold its future citizens in order to facilitate and implement their administration and governance.

This paper explores the role of the Hong Kong Government in the initiation and implementation of civic education.

To provide readers with a summary and appraisal of the book, Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility.

After a thorough examination of the text, its value is considered from the perspective of a university faculty member who is interested in the development of citizen education programs.

Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility provides a thought‐provoking case for the development of civic and moral learning programs at undergraduate institutions. Using their research at 12 diverse higher learning institutions, the authors highlight the importance of and impediments to developing citizen education programs and go further to define and establish goals for such programs. Detailed strategies on how to incorporate civic learning into the classroom, curriculum programs, extracurricular activities, and the institution at large are also evaluated.

This review is written from the perspective of a faculty member at a large US public university. While there are many commonalities between perspectives from the diversity of higher learning institutions, there are likely to be some differences.

This review provides the reader with insight into Educating Citizens: Preparing America's Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility and will aid in the decision to examine this text.

Given that citizen education initiatives are gaining international recognition, the reader is likely to gain further understanding into how colleges and universities are approaching the increasing demand for civic learning.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the major development of global citizenship education (GCE) as part of Hong Kong’s secondary school curriculum guidelines, which reveals how it has developed from, first, asking students to understand their responsibilities as citizens to now challenging injustice and inequality in the world. Hong Kong’s curriculum guidelines started to teach GCE as a result of the last civic education guideline issued just before the return of sovereignty to China in 1997. Through documentary analysis, this paper examines how GCE has developed against the backdrop of globalization in Hong Kong’s various secondary school curriculum guidelines.

This study used documentary analysis to examine the developments in the teaching of GCE via Hong Kong’s official secondary school curriculum guidelines. It has studied the aims, knowledge and concepts that are related to GCE by coding the GCE literature and categorizing the findings from the curriculum guidelines.

From the coding and categorizing processes employed, it has been found that GCE in Hong Kong’s official curriculum guidelines has evolved from learning about rights and responsibilities in the 1990s to challenging injustice, discrimination, exclusion and inequality since the late 1990s. Indeed, understanding the world and especially globalization, in terms of comprehending the processes and phenomena through which people around the globe become more connected, has presented challenges for the teaching of civic education. For example, categories of GCE have developed from the simpler expression of concerns about the world to encompass moral obligations and taking action. Similarly, the concerns for the maintenance of peace that were studied initially have since grown and now include work about challenging inequalities and taking action on human rights violations.

This study would have implications for the understanding of GCE in Hong Kong as well as other fast-changing societies in this age of globalization, as civic education curricula need to respond to the impacts of globalization. GCE is an under-researched area, but topics concerning world/international/global affairs have been covered in Hong Kong secondary school curriculum guidelines for several decades.

In China, it is the continuation of citizenship education in primary schools, which lays the foundation for citizenship education in senior high schools. So the authors have chosen citizenship education at the junior high schools stage in mainland China as the purpose of this paper is to provide answers to three research questions: (1) is ideological and moral education citizenship education at junior high schools in China? (2) What is the content of citizenship education at junior high schools in China? (3) What are the characteristics of citizenship education at junior high schools in China?

This paper adopts the methods of literature review and text analysis. Text analysis means that researchers must study from the surface to the depths of a text and grasp the profound meaning which cannot be found otherwise by general readers. Of course, there are many modes of text analysis. Here, we mainly adopt intertextuality and dialogue analysis modes to understand citizenship education and its characteristics from the Ideology and Morality textbooks. The analysis of the textbooks has been carried out from three perspectives (i.e. the concepts, contents and teaching methods of citizenship education), where the focus is on the analysis of the textbook content. Through literature review, this study presents a critique of the definitions, and of analogous and conflicting ideas, to provide answers to research questions RQ1 and RQ2. Because of the authority and representativeness of the Ideology and Morality textbooks in citizenship education studies at the relevant stage in mainland China, they are chosen and are subject to text analysis from three perspectives (i.e. the concept, content and teaching method of citizenship education), to answer RQ3. The paper’s argument is built on an appropriate base of theory and concepts.

Through a textual analysis of Ideology and Morality for junior high schools in China, we can report the following findings: First, the junior high school ideological and moral course is citizenship education with Chinese characteristics. Second, the contents of citizenship education in junior high schools in China include the identification of the Chinese state and nation, the enhancement of citizenship education based upon the unity of right and obligations, and the importance of the contents and requirements of such civic knowledge as a means for public consciousness education. Third, the methods involve classroom instruction and the participation in practical activities.

The Ideology and Morality course in junior high schools in China is representative of a citizenship education that has Chinese characteristics. The citizenship education at this stage is peculiar, but its construction is far from perfect. Besides, this special form of education is now facing challenges from burgeoning nationalism and globalization, which is creating pressure for the improvement of the theories of citizenship education presented in this period, the standardization of its content and the change of its methods of delivery. This paper sheds light on this issue to some extent.

The purpose of this paper is to compare and analyse the role and implementation of nationalistic education in Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions (SARs) since their respective handover of sovereignty to China in the late 1990s. Both SARs face the educational need to cultivate a Chinese national identification among the students after the sovereignty changes. While Macau SAR has enjoyed a relatively smooth implementation of nationalistic education towards which Macau’s schools and students are largely receptive to nationalistic programmes since its handover in 1999, Hong Kong SAR Government’s nationalistic education was met by reservation from some parents, students and civil society’s groups under allegations of “political indoctrination” and “brain-washing”. The Hong Kong civil society’s resistance to National Education culminated in the anti-Moral and National Education protest in Summer 2012 and then Hong Kong schools and society. This paper attempts to provide an overview and analysis on the development of nationalistic education in both Hong Kong and Macao SARs, and to give some possible explanations on the factors that lead to differences of perceiving and responding to the nationalistic education between both places.

After conducting a literature review, this study utilises different sources of data such as curriculum guidelines, previous studies and other scholarly findings in examining the development of civic education and national education policy in both SAR societies, as well as in discussing the possible developments of nationalistic education in both SARs by making references to previous studies of citizenship and nationalistic education.

This study found out that different relationships between the two SAR Governments and their respective civil society, the extent of established socio-political linkages with China, as well as the introduction of a core subject of Liberal Studies in Hong Kong secondary schools, which emphasises on multiple perspectives and critical thinking skills, are some plausible factors that explain different stories and developments of implementing nationalistic education in Hong Kong and Macao SARs.

For giving suggestions for a nationalistic education in both Chinese SARs, first, there should be an exploration of multiple citizenship identities. This will allow people to choose their identities and thus facilitate their belongingness in terms of local, national and global dimensions. In addition, there should be an exploration of a Chinese national identification with different emphases such as knowledge orientation and critical thinking so as to cater for youth values. Promoting the idea of an informed and reasonable-in-thinking patriot could also be a way to ease the concern that building a national identity negates a person’s freedom of thinking.

This paper attempts to compare and analyse the different responses to the same policy of enhancing nationalistic education development in both Hong Kong and Macao SARs of China. Some plausible explanations were given based on political, social and educational factors, as well as youth value oritentations. This paper would be an attempt to show that a top-down single-minded orientated nationalistic education may not work well a society such as Hong Kong, where civil society and youth values are quite different than that can be found in China.

National identification among young people and the issues about how national education should be conducted have been the significant topics when the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was entering its third decade of the establishment. This paper was written based on data the authors obtained upon participation in a project organized by the Centre for Catholic Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The project was carried out after the official curriculum, known as the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide, was shelved due to popular resentment. The project aimed at capturing the timely opportunity for substantial resources available for school-based operation of moral and national education and developing an alternative curriculum about teaching national issues and identification for Catholic Diocese and Convent primary schools to adopt. This paper aims to investigate the nature of this Catholic Project and examines the extent to which it is a counterhegemonic project or one for teaching to belong to a nation (Mathews, Ma and Lui, 2007). It assesses the project’s possible contribution to citizenship and national education in Hong Kong, since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide.

The authors of this paper worked in an education university of Hong Kong and were invited to be team members of this Catholic Project. The role comprised proposing topics for teacher training, conducting seminars, giving comments to teaching resources, observing and giving feedback to schools that tried out the teaching and designing/implementing an evaluative survey and conducting follow-up interviews with involved parties such as teachers and key officials of the Catholic Centre. Given this, the research involved can be perceived as action research. This paper was written up with both the qualitative and quantitative data the authors collected when working the project.

This paper reported a Catholic citizenship training project with the focus on a Catholic school project on preparing students to understand the nation by learning national issues analytically. The ultimate goal was to ensure teachers in Catholic primary schools could lead the students to examine national issues and other social issues from the perspective of Catholic social ethics. Though the project arose after the failure of the government to force through its controversial national education programme, this paper found that instead of being an alternative curriculum with resistance flavour, the project was basically a self-perfection programme for the Catholic. It was to fill a shortfall observed of Catholic schools, namely, not doing enough to let students examine social and national issues with Catholic social ethics, which, indeed, had a good interface with many cherished universal values. In the final analysis, the project is not a typical national education programme, which teaches students to belong to a nation but an innovative alternative curriculum transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions as advanced by western literature (for example, Gramsci, 1971; Freire, 1970; and Apple, 1993).

The paper contributes to the literature of Hong Kong studies and citizenship education studies. The results of such an innovative endeavour, which captures and capitalizes the opportunity and resources for developing a national education curriculum in school-based manner. Attention was paid to the endeavour’s nature and its possible contribution to the knowledge, policies and practices of citizenship and national education in Hong Kong amidst deep social transformations. In particular, the paper can add to the specific literature about Hong Kong’s citizenship and national education development since the withdrawal of the Moral and National Education Curriculum Guide. Using an empirical example of Asian schooling and society, analysis of this paper illustrates the way in which development of an alternative curriculum is more innovative and interesting, transcending the hegemony-resistance ideological tensions.