This is not a footnote to the press freedom crackdown. It is the crackdown’s most durable investment, aimed at people too young to remember what came before it.
HONG KONG – Hong Kong education officials have mandated that universities across the territory incorporate “national security education” into standard curricula, embedding the same expansive legal and political framework driving the crackdown on independent media directly into the formal instruction young Hong Kongers receive as part of their degrees. The policy has drawn considerably less international coverage than Jimmy Lai’s sentencing or the bookstore raids, in part because it lacks a single dramatic arrest or courtroom moment to anchor a headline around. It may nonetheless be the most consequential single policy in the entire post-2020 crackdown, because it is explicitly designed to shape how an entire generation understands the events happening around them, rather than simply punishing those who report on those events after the fact.
The substance of “national security education,” as implemented across Hong Kong’s university system, extends well beyond narrow instruction on the specific provisions of the National Security Law itself. It functions as a broader vehicle for embedding an officially sanctioned account of Hong Kong’s recent political history, one in which the 2019 protest movement is recast primarily as foreign-instigated unrest rather than a genuine, homegrown expression of political grievance, and in which the National Security Law itself is framed as a necessary restoration of stability rather than the dismantlement of civil liberties that press freedom organizations worldwide have documented it to be. Students are not simply being taught what the law says. They are being taught how to interpret the years immediately preceding it.
This is precisely why the policy deserves more scrutiny than it has received. A journalist jailed under the National Security Law affects one person’s life directly and sends a chilling signal to other journalists currently working. A curriculum mandate affects every single student who passes through Hong Kong’s university system going forward, for as long as the mandate remains in place, shaping the baseline political assumptions of the territory’s future civil servants, lawyers, teachers, and, yes, journalists, before most of them are old enough to have formed independent judgments about the events being taught to them as settled history.
Comparative examples from other authoritarian systems are instructive here, however uncomfortable the comparison may be for officials insisting Hong Kong’s trajectory remains fundamentally different from mainland China’s. Political education requirements embedded directly into university curricula have historically proven to be among the most durable tools available to governments seeking to manage long-term public opinion, precisely because they operate upstream of any individual act of censorship or prosecution. You do not need to arrest a generation of dissenters if that generation has been systematically taught, from their formative educational years onward, that the version of events justifying the current political order is simply the accurate one.
Hong Kong’s university administrators, many operating under considerable institutional pressure of their own, have generally implemented these mandates without significant public resistance, a compliance that reflects less genuine consensus than the same climate of institutional caution now visible across Hong Kong Journalists Association silence, RTHK’s editorial capture, and the broader pattern of professional bodies calculating that public objection carries risks few individuals or institutions are currently willing to absorb. That calculation is entirely rational given the visible consequences facing those who have objected loudly. It does not make the underlying curriculum change any less significant simply because nobody with the standing to object publicly has chosen to do so.
The press freedom crackdown, documented extensively through jailed journalists, raided newsrooms, and deregistered companies, has an expiration date built into its own logic: eventually, the current generation of journalists is either jailed, exiled, or silenced, and the institutions they built are fully dismantled. National security education in the university curriculum has no comparable expiration date. It is designed to produce compliance that renews itself with every incoming class, long after the current wave of prosecutions has run its course. Judged purely as a matter of long-term strategic effectiveness, it may be the single most successful policy Beijing has implemented in Hong Kong since 2020, and it is also the one receiving the least sustained international attention.
Some university faculty, speaking only privately given the professional risk of public comment, have described a growing self-censorship among students themselves, a caution about which questions to ask in seminar or which historical framings to challenge in written work, that predates any specific enforcement action against a particular student. That anticipatory caution, students adjusting their own behavior before any formal violation has even occurred, is arguably the curriculum mandate’s most efficient achievement: compliance secured not through punishment but through students internalizing the boundaries themselves.
Hong Kong’s university rankings and international academic partnerships have, so far, remained largely intact despite the curriculum changes, a continuity administrators point to as evidence the mandate has not meaningfully damaged the territory’s higher education standing. That continuity says considerably more about how slowly international academic institutions respond to political developments in partner countries than it does about the actual substance of what Hong Kong students are now required to learn as a condition of their degree.
For related commentary on how political education shapes long-term public opinion under authoritarian systems, see Political Humour and Satire Site, plus further reading at How to Write Satire for the UK.
Additional coverage at What Is Political Satire?.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/