Hong Kong leader vows education overhaul just after protests
11 May, 2020
Hong Kong's pro-Beijing innovator on Monday (Might 11) vowed to overhaul the city's education system, arguing its liberal research curriculum helped fuel previous year's violent protests.
LEADER Carrie Lam described the existing secondary school program as a "chicken coop with out a roof" and said her government would rapidly unveil their plans.
"In terms of handling the subject of liberal studies later on, we will certainly make things apparent to the general public within this season," she told the pro-government Ta Kung Pao newspaper within an interview published Monday (May 11).
Her comments are likely to inflame those Hong Kongers who fear Beijing is chipping away at the freedoms that produce the city a significant intercontinental draw as political tensions rise once again.
With the backing of Beijing, Hong Kong's government is pushing ahead with a Bill that outlaws insulting China's national anthem and top rated pro-establishment figures are lobbying for an anti-sedition law.
The federal government says new legislation is needed to curb snowballing support - especially among younger Hong Kongers - for democracy and greater autonomy from China.
Opponents mention the laws will scale back on free speech and do little to heal the city's festering divides.
Hong Kong has some of Asia's best colleges and universities with educational freedoms unseen on mainland China.
Liberal analyses was introduced in '09 2009 in an effort to foster critical pondering with schools permitted to choose how they teach it.
But it has become a bete noire for Chinese state media and pro-Beijing politicians who've called for more patriotic education.
In Monday's interview, Lam said she felt the classes allowed teachers to push their political biases and that higher oversight by the federal government was now needed.
Hong Kong was convulsed by seven straight months of often-violent youth-led protests last year, with millions hitting the streets.
More than 8,000 people have already been arrested - around 17 per cent of these secondary school students.
The mass arrests and the coronavirus pandemic ushered in a period of enforced calm.
But with the finance hub successfully tackling its COVID-19 outbreak - and social distancing measures easing - little protests possess bubbled up.
On Sunday, riot police chased flash-mob protesters through multiple stores.
They later on used pepper spray and batons against protesters, bystanders and journalists in the district of Mong Kok.
Multiple arrests were made, most of them youngsters.
Lam has resisted demands universal suffrage or an independent inquiry in to the police's handling of the protests.
In the New Year, she vowed to heal the divisions coursing through Hong Kong, but her administration has offered little in the way of reconciliation or a political solution.
Arrests and prosecutions experience continued apace, even though Beijing's offices found in the city sparked a good constitutional row last month by announcing a larger say found in how Hong Kong is work.
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