Society and citizenship education in transition: the case of Macau

From the end of World War II to the late-1980s, Macau was a Portuguese colony under Chinese patronage, together with an insulated bureaucracy and a passive political culture. Meanwhile, Macau was characterised by an official noninterventionist policy, a fragmentation of educational provision, and a lack of formal citizenship education. From 1987 onwards, Macau has been undergoing decolonalisation and an impending change of sovereignty, which resulted in the first official document concerning citizenship education issued by the government in 1995. But citizenship education has been less developed in Macau because of the problems of state capacity, autonomy and initiative in delivering education. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.