According to the Central News Agency, Hong Kong’s school publishers have overhauled their junior secondary Chinese history textbooks for 2026, scrubbing language that described the Qing dynasty voluntarily ceding territory to Britain and replacing it with vocabulary that frames the entire colonial era as unlawful occupation. The revisions reach well beyond word choice. New editions embed Beijing’s sovereignty claims into classroom maps, inject loyalty and law-enforcement messaging into lessons on historical protest movements, and align the territory’s official educational narrative with the positions enshrined in China’s constitution and Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the mini-constitution imposed after the 1997 handover. The changes represent the most systematic rewriting of Hong Kong’s colonial history since Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on the territory in 2020 and began dismantling its previously liberal education framework.
New textbooks replace treaty-based language with terms describing British seizure
The most consequential change concerns how the textbooks describe the legal basis of British rule. Previous editions used the term “ceded” (割让) when describing the Qing government’s transfer of Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula to Britain under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 and the Convention of Peking in 1860, and the lease of the New Territories in 1898. The language was historically accurate: Qing officials signed those agreements, whatever the surrounding circumstances of duress.
New editions from at least two major publishers, Ya Ji’s New Chinese History Journey and Ling Ji’s Highlight Chinese History, have replaced “ceded” with terms meaning “forcibly occupied” (强占), “forcibly leased” (强租), and “seized” (侵占). The revision erases the legal act of treaty-signing and substitutes a framing in which Britain simply took the territory by force, with no Chinese government involvement in any transfer of authority. The practical effect is to bring the textbooks into alignment with Beijing’s longstanding position that all 19th-century unequal treaties were null and void, a claim China has asserted politically but that has never supplanted the historical record in Hong Kong’s own classrooms until now.
An unnamed teacher cited by the Sing Tao Daily, which first reported the changes, said the new terminology reflects the current official line from Beijing: the goal is to consolidate the concept of national sovereignty and bring textbook content into alignment with the Chinese constitution and the Basic Law.
Beijing’s disputed South China Sea claim now appears on Hong Kong classroom maps
The revisions go further than language. New editions include maps featuring the “nine-dash line,” Beijing’s expansive claim to most of the South China Sea, along with the Spratly Islands. The nine-dash line has no basis in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea; an international tribunal ruled against it in 2016. Its appearance in Hong Kong junior secondary textbooks is a direct importation of Chinese state cartography into classrooms that, a decade ago, operated under a substantially different editorial framework.
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Teachers cited in the report said publishers told them the map changes were required to comply with official curriculum revisions. The instruction appears to have left publishers no discretion.
The new editions also retrofit law-and-order messaging onto lessons about events that took place more than a century ago. Sections covering the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a mass student protest against foreign imperialism that became a foundational moment in modern Chinese nationalism, now carry teacher reference materials instructing educators to guide students toward understanding the importance of “rational and lawful” behavior and to adopt a zero-tolerance position on violence.
The same logic is applied to lessons on the revolutionary period that brought down the Qing dynasty. When textbooks describe political assassinations carried out by republican revolutionaries against Qing officials, teacher reference notes remind educators that “killing or injuring others is illegal.”
The framing produces a conspicuous contradiction. The May Fourth Movement is celebrated by the Chinese Communist Party as a patriotic milestone, a founding moment in the nationalist awakening the Party claims to embody. The textbooks now simultaneously venerate the movement’s nationalist spirit and instruct students to treat its participants as cautionary examples of unlawful conduct. The contradiction is a feature of the revision, not an oversight: students are being taught to admire the political results of historical protest while rejecting any present-day right to replicate it.
Hong Kong educators are divided, but publishers say they had no choice
Reactions from Hong Kong’s education community are mixed. Some veteran Chinese history teachers have expressed reservations, arguing that historical education requires students to understand the context of events before applying contemporary moral judgments. Imposing present-day legal standards on 19th-century revolutionary actors distorts the historical record and erodes the credibility of the curriculum.
Other teachers have been more pragmatic. Publishers have moved to align their products with the direction set by Hong Kong’s education authorities, which since 2020 have pushed schools toward greater emphasis on national identity, loyalty, and law-abidingness. Teachers retain some professional discretion in how they deliver lessons, but the textbooks establish the baseline, and the baseline has shifted decisively.
The 2026 revisions are the latest step in a systematic overhaul of Hong Kong’s curriculum that accelerated after Beijing imposed the national security law in 2020. Authorities disbanded the territory’s liberal studies program, a subject that had encouraged students to analyze current affairs critically, and replaced it with a course called “citizenship and social development,” designed to strengthen students’ identification with mainland China. The history textbook changes extend that project into the past, rewriting how Hong Kong students understand the origins of the territory itself.
By Li Ming, Vision Times
