Asymmetric Curricular Securitisation: Language Policy and the Patriotic Turn in Hong Kong’s Primary Curriculum Reform
This paper employs corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis to demonstrate that Hong Kong's post-2019 ideological shift has produced an "asymmetric curricular securitisation" in primary education, wherein the Chinese curriculum constructs a monolithic national subject through substantive cultural heritage, while the English curriculum fosters a "global-national" subject through enabling modality and newly imported patriotic vocabulary, ultimately erasing Cantonese and revealing a differentiated, language-specific mechanism of policy enactment.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the world of education, the books and guides that tell teachers what to teach are more than just lists of topics; they are blueprints for how children learn to see the world. These documents decide which words are important, which stories are worth telling, and what kind of person a student is expected to become. In Hong Kong, a place where English and Chinese are both official languages, these guides have long served a dual purpose: English was seen as the key to global opportunity and business, while Chinese was the vessel for cultural heritage and national identity. For decades, this arrangement seemed stable, a practical way to manage a society with deep local roots and global connections. However, recent political changes have shifted the ground beneath these subjects. A new set of laws and educational frameworks has introduced a strong emphasis on national security and patriotism, asking schools to weave these themes into every part of learning. The question for researchers became simple but profound: when a government asks for this kind of change, does it happen in the same way for every language, or does the language itself change how the message is delivered?
A researcher at Hong Kong Metropolitan University set out to answer this by looking closely at the official guides used for primary school students. She compared the 2023 guide for Chinese language with the brand-new 2025 guide for English language, which was the first time an English guide had been written specifically just for primary schools. To do this, she did not just read the pages; she used computer tools to count every word, looking for patterns in how often certain ideas appeared, how sentences were built, and which words were missing entirely. She examined over 33,000 Chinese characters and more than 75,000 English words, searching for signs of how the new political focus on national security and patriotic values had been written into the curriculum. The goal was to see if the English subject, traditionally associated with global thinking and critical questioning, had simply copied the Chinese subject's approach, or if it had absorbed these new ideas in a completely different way.
The study found that the new political ideas have indeed entered the English curriculum, but they did not arrive in the same form as they did in the Chinese one. In the Chinese guide, the focus on national identity and culture is woven deeply into the fabric of the subject. The language used is direct and commanding, telling students what they must do and what they should learn. The text is filled with references to Chinese culture as a single, unified heritage that students are expected to absorb and carry forward. It is a subject where the student is positioned as someone being shaped by a strong, guiding hand, learning to be a moral person within a specific national tradition.
In contrast, the English guide tells a different story, even though it now includes the same new vocabulary about national security. The English guide does not become commanding; instead, it remains encouraging and permissive. It uses words that suggest students can explore, can develop, and can choose. The new patriotic terms, such as "national security" and "patriotic," appear in the text, but they are added like a layer on top of a curriculum that still focuses on skills, global citizenship, and individual agency. It is as if the English guide kept its original personality—friendly and open to the world—but put on a new jacket that signals loyalty to the nation. The researchers noted that while the Chinese guide tells students they must cultivate a specific cultural identity, the English guide tells students they can be skilled global citizens who also happen to hold certain national values.
This difference creates a split in the kind of student the curriculum is trying to build. Through Chinese, the student is constructed as a moral member of a nation, deeply connected to a shared cultural past. Through English, the student is constructed as a capable, independent individual who can navigate the world but is also bound by national rules. The study also revealed what was missing. The local language of Hong Kong, Cantonese, which was mentioned a few times in the older English guide, has been completely removed from the 2025 version. At the same time, words related to democracy, human rights, and the specific identity of being a "Hong Konger" are absent from both guides. This silence is not an accident; it is a consistent pattern where certain topics are simply not named, making the new national focus seem like the only natural way to view the world.
The researcher argues that this is not a case of the two subjects becoming identical. Instead, it is a case of "asymmetric securitisation." This means that the national security message is distributed across the curriculum in a way that respects the different roles the two languages play. The heritage language, Chinese, carries the heavy, substantive weight of national identity and cultural formation. The global language, English, carries the message as a framework or a boundary around its usual focus on skills and opportunity. The English guide has not become a copy of the Chinese one; it has become a hybrid, where the freedom to think and explore is still present, but it now operates within a tighter, newly defined set of national values.
This finding suggests that when governments change what schools teach, they do not simply stamp the same message onto every subject. They use the existing strengths and histories of each language to deliver the message in a way that feels natural to that subject. In Hong Kong, this means the national story is told through the deep, cultural roots of Chinese, while the global story is told through the adaptable, skill-based nature of English, with the new political requirements carefully grafted onto both. The study concludes that this method allows the new ideology to spread across the whole curriculum without forcing every subject to sound the same, creating a system where a student learns to be a national citizen in one language and a global citizen in another, both under the same overarching political framework.
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