Hong Kong has long branded itself as “Asia’s World City”—a cosmopolitan entrepôt where East meets West, open to global capital, ideas, and influences under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework. This geographical imagination, cultivated through colonial legacies, international connectivity, and a distinct local identity, positioned the city as a bridge between liberal democratic values and Asian dynamism (Vickers 2003). Yet, since the enactment of the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020 and the subsequent intensification of National Security Education (NSE), this imagination is undergoing deliberate rescaling. Through curriculum reforms that foreground “Chinese success,” traditional values, cultural security, and warnings against external threats, national education is redefining what “international” means for Hong Kong’s youth—from a Eurocentric, pluralistic globalism toward a Sinocentric vision centered on national rejuvenation and integration into the Greater Bay Area (Education Bureau 2025; Vickers and Morris 2022).
This article argues that NSE does more than instill patriotism; it actively reshapes young Hong Kongers’ geographical imaginations by recentering the city within a hierarchical national order while reinterpreting global engagement through a China-led lens. Narratives of Chinese technological and civilizational achievements, paired with securitized framings of external forces, risk fostering a subtle xenophobia by constructing the West and liberal values as potential threats to cultural and political security. This transformation carries profound implications for Hong Kong’s future identity, its role in international relations, and the spatial politics of belonging in a securitized city (Vickers 2024; Yan 2025).
Political geographers have long examined how education constructs “imaginative geographies” that define centers, peripheries, and legitimate forms of international engagement (Said 1978). In Hong Kong, pre-2019 curricula and public discourse reinforced a hybrid identity that balanced Chineseness with a distinctive local-global orientation. Identity surveys consistently showed strong “Hongkonger” identification alongside cultural affinity with China (Guo 2025).
Post-NSL reforms accelerate a process of scalar rescaling: a deliberate reconfiguration of power, governance, and identity across different geographical scales—local, regional, national, and global—which are socially constructed and politically contested rather than fixed or natural (Brenner 2001; Swyngedouw 2004). States and institutions actively “upscale” or “downscale” issues to shift authority and reshape spatial relations. In the Hong Kong context, this involves repositioning the city from a semi-autonomous global hub to an integral node in China’s national development strategy. Hong Kong is being repositioned from a semi-autonomous global hub to an integral node in China’s national development strategy.
The Curriculum Framework of National Security Education in Hong Kong (updated 2025) embeds national security elements across subjects, including English, history, geography-related studies, and values education. It promotes “Taking root in Chinese Culture, Connecting with the World, Embracing the Future,” with Chinese culture as the backbone (Education Bureau 2025). Official documents emphasize Hong Kong’s contributions to national security through economic interdependence with the Mainland, cultural preservation, and vigilance against “external interference.” Learning elements highlight China’s achievements in science, technology, infrastructure, and ecological conservation, fostering national pride. In history and citizenship modules, Hong Kong’s development is framed within the broader narrative of national modernization and resistance to foreign humiliation (Education Bureau 2025; Vickers and Morris 2022). This constitutes a form of scalar upscaling: local and international perspectives are increasingly filtered through national security imperatives. The replacement of Liberal Studies with Citizenship and Social Development (CSD) has been critiqued for narrowing critical space and prioritizing official narratives of stability and integration (Yan 2025; Vickers 2024).
The reforms do not eliminate “international” content; they redefine it. “Connecting with the world” now occurs within the framework of a “community of shared future for mankind”—a Beijing-coined concept emphasizing multipolarity under Chinese leadership, including the Belt and Road Initiative. Students learn about cultural heritage preservation as a matter of cultural security, with modules contrasting or comparing Chinese traditions favorably against external influences (Education Bureau 2025; Fu and Yang 2023). In subjects such as English and general studies, research tasks direct students toward China’s cultural sites, technological innovations, and heritage protection technologies, while discussing threats like “external ideological infiltration.” This subtly shifts the reference point of cosmopolitanism: Hong Kong remains “international,” but its global linkages are oriented toward contributing to national strength rather than maintaining pluralistic openness as an end in itself (Vickers and Morris 2022). Such reframing aligns with broader state spatial strategies, including Greater Bay Area (GBA) integration, where Hong Kong’s unique advantages serve national goals. This rescales the city from an offshore global financial center toward deeper embedding in national territoriality (Bennett 2021; Fu and Yang 2023).
Critics argue that alongside positive narratives of Chinese success and values (harmony, patriotism, collective responsibility), the curriculum incorporates securitized warnings about “external forces,” collusion, and ideological threats. Comprehensive national security encompasses political, cultural, and ideological dimensions, with external interference frequently cited as a risk (Education Bureau 2025). While official discourse stresses “open patriotism” and mutual learning among cultures, the emphasis on vigilance, bottom-line thinking, and cultural security can produce discursive effects that other liberal democratic values or Western influences as destabilizing. Edward Vickers describes this as part of accelerated “mainlandisation” and securitization, where schooling promotes a monolithic vision of Chineseness that marginalizes alternative identities (Vickers and Morris 2022; Vickers 2024). Some educators resist quietly through subtle pedagogies, but the structural pressure toward conformity is evident (Lui 2024). The potential outcome is not necessarily overt xenophobia, but a narrowed geographical imagination in which loyalty to the national center becomes the primary lens for interpreting global events, and dissent or cosmopolitan critique risks being framed as insecurity.
This educational project tests the resilience of Hong Kong’s hybrid identity. By reshaping how young people conceptualize their city’s place in the world—moving from a vibrant, somewhat autonomous global interface to a patriotic contributor within a Sinocentric order—it seeks to resolve post-2019 tensions through deeper national integration. Success would stabilize governance on Beijing’s terms but may come at the cost of the very international distinctiveness that underpinned Hong Kong’s economic and soft power advantages (Bennett 2021). The stakes extend beyond identity. A generation socialized into this rescaled imagination may approach international relations, innovation, and cultural exchange differently, with greater alignment to national priorities. Whether hybridity can persist—retaining critical global perspectives alongside national belonging—remains an open question under the weight of securitized education (Guo 2025; Vickers 2024).
As Hong Kong navigates this transformation, national security education reveals itself as a powerful tool of spatial and ideological governance. It does not merely teach geography or history; it produces new geographical imaginations suited to a changed political order. The long-term effects on youth agency, creativity, and the city’s global role will unfold in the coming decades, making this one of the most consequential quiet battlegrounds in contemporary Hong Kong.
References
Bennett, Mia M. 2021. “Whose Offshore? Rescaling Hong Kong from Asia’s World City to China’s Greater Bay Area.” Area Development and Policy 6 (1): 28–49. https://doi.org/10.1080/23792949.2020.1871387.
Brenner, Neil. 2001. “The Limits to Scale? Methodological Reflections on Scalar Structuration.” Progress in Human Geography 25 (4): 591–614.
Education Bureau. 2025. Curriculum Framework of National Security Education in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Education Bureau. https://www.edb.gov.hk/attachment/en/curriculum-development/4-key-tasks/moral-civic/nse/nse2025_framework_en.pdf.
Fu, Chao, and An Yang. 2023. “How China’s Great Bay Area Policies Affect the National Identity of Hong Kong Youth—A Study of a Quasi-Natural Experiment Based on the Difference-in-Differences Model.” Behavioral Sciences 13 (8): 644. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13080644.
Guo, Yufei. 2025. “Mapping the Language-in-Identity Configuration in Hong Kong.” International Journal of Multilingualism, 1 (June September): 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2025.2559184.
Lui, Lake. 2024. “Winning Quietly: Hong Kong Educators’ Resistance to National Security Education.” The Sociological Review 72 (2): 451-470. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261231194505.
Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books.
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2004. “Scaled Geographies: Nature, Place, and the Politics of Scale.” In Scale and Geographic Inquiry: Nature, Society, and Method, edited by Eric Sheppard and Robert B. McMaster, 129–153. Oxford: Blackwell.
Vickers, Edward. 2003. “The Reeducation of Hong Kong: Identity, Politics and Education in Postcolonial Hong Kong.” American Asian Review 21 (4): 179–228.
Vickers, Edward. 2024. “The Motherland’s Suffocating Embrace: Schooling and Public Discourse on Hong Kong Identity under the National Security Law.” Comparative Education 60 (1): 138–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2023.2212351.
Vickers, Edward, and Paul Morris. 2022. “Accelerating Hong Kong’s Reeducation: ‘Mainlandisation’, Securitisation and the 2020 National Security Law.”Comparative Education 58 (2): 187–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050068.2022.2046878.
Yan, Kin Cheung Adrian. 2025. “The Life and Death of Liberal Studies: Explaining Curriculum Change in Post-Handover Hong Kong.” Journal of Curriculum Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2024.2425638.
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