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More than 20,000 Hong Kong schoolteachers, students and parents join email campaign against teacher’s deregistration after independence discussion

  • But Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily praises move by officials as ‘important step’ to ‘bring things back to order’
  • Campaign comes from groups in sector, with automatic online mechanism sending emails to city’s education chief and deputy

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Hong Kong Secretary for Education Kevin Yeung (right) and Permanent Secretary for Education Michelle Li. The petition campaign sent emails to the pair, denouncing the deregistration of a teacher. Photo: Dickson Lee
More than 20,000 schoolteachers, students and parents have joined an email campaign against the move by Hong Kong education authorities to deregister a teacher accused of spreading pro-independence messages in class.
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Supporters of the campaign called the decision political suppression, arguing that the teacher had only asked pupils to analyse objective news material.

But Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily on Thursday praised the move by officials, saying it was “an important step for the education sector to bring things back to order”.

In a commentary, the newspaper said Hong Kong’s education sector was “seriously ill” and “if the source of the disease was not cured”, more pupils would become “political fuel”.

“More school campuses will become hotbeds for independence notions,” it said.

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Alliance Primary School in Kowloon Tong. Photo: Felix Wong
Alliance Primary School in Kowloon Tong. Photo: Felix Wong
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