In recent years, much research has been published on nationalism and national identity formation in East Asia. It has been frequently noted that “official” historical narratives disseminated through school curricula have been crucial to popularizing state-sanctioned national and worldviews and legitimizing the polity. Yet, excepting research into the international controversies surrounding Japanese history textbook portrayals of Japan's wartime past, few studies have looked beyond a handful of government directives and textbooks. What has been written, moreover, has often assumed that political authoritarianism and/or the highly centralized nature of curriculum and textbook development in most of East Asia (at least until very recently) have rendered history education little more than a top-down process of attempted ideological indoctrination, an assumption reinforced by theories that depict mass education primarily as a means by which social and political elites sustain their hegemony.

In Search of an Identity offers a long overdue examination of this neglected field, focusing on the interesting case of Hong Kong where the territory's dual Chinese–British heritage has been reflected in the inclusion of two wholly separate history subjects in the school curriculum: Chinese history, taught in Cantonese and chronologically narrating 5,000 years of Chinese civilization; and history, taught predominantly in English and covering assorted historical periods and events world-wide. This meticulously detailed study charts the evolution of the history subject at fourth to sixth-form levels (ages 14–18) from the late 1960s through retrocession up to 2002, coverage which is extended in the forthcoming paperback edition to 2004 to include the latest textbook revisions (Comparative Education Research Centre, Hong Kong University, 2005).