The Social Consequences of Education Policy: Welfare, Migration, Mobility, Equity and Civil Society in Hong Kong

When we investigate the impact of education on social stratification, how can we separate causes from effects? During recent history, and in most countries, schools and universities grew as a response to expressed popular demand. But a few cases are well-documented exceptions to this pattern. Hong Kong can be seen as a natural experiment for the impact of a supply-driven and state-controlled education policy, where public demand played a comparatively small role. Post's investigation documents and analyzes the most important social and political consequences of education since 1971, over a period when the British colony of Hong Kong reverted to the sovereignty of the Peoples Republic of China and became a Special Administrative Region (SAR). The study is based on primary and secondary documents and interviews with political leaders. In addition, Post analyzes the changing determinants of access to education as these are revealed through random household-level samples of census data from 1971, 1976, 1981, 1986, 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006. The findings illuminate the ways that the unequal distribution of parental investments, between sons and daughters, responded to the government's deliberate expansions of secondary schooling (after 1978) and higher education (during the 1980s, and especially after the Tiananmen student massacre).