Book Review: Re-Shaping Education for Citizenship: Democratic National Citizenship in Hong Kong

Abstract

The first contribution is that the book provides, through an analysis of "one country two systems" citizenship in post-1997 Hong Kong, a good examination of the competition in citizenship education between local citizenship and national citizenship, which demand respective affiliation to and identification with the local and national communities, and therefore require dual but competing allegiances to communities at two different levels in a multileveled polity. With empirical evidence from a secondary school in Hong Kong, the book demonstrates that schools can serve as socializing agents, initiating students into certain sets of citizenship knowledge, values and attitudes in preparation for becoming active and functioning citizens, and as a socializing agency in which different views and types of citizenship compete with one another and teachers and students can choose what to teach and learn.