Hong Kong has long branded itself as “Asia’s World City”—a cosmopolitan entrepôt where East meets West, open to global capital, ideas, and influences under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework. This geographical imagination, cultivated through colonial legacies, international connectivity, and a distinct local identity, positioned the city as a bridge between liberal democratic values and Asian dynamism (Vickers 2003). Yet, since the enactment of the National Security Law (NSL) in 2020 and the subsequent intensification of National Security Education (NSE), this imagination is undergoing deliberate rescaling. Through curriculum reforms that foreground “Chinese success,” traditional values, cultural security, and warnings against external threats, national education is redefining what “international” means for Hong Kong’s youth—from a Eurocentric, pluralistic globalism toward a Sinocentric vision centered on national rejuvenation and integration into the Greater Bay Area (Education Bureau 2025; Vickers and Morris 2022).

This article argues that NSE does more than instill patriotism; it actively reshapes young Hong Kongers’ geographical imaginations by recentering the city within a hierarchical national order while reinterpreting global engagement through a China-led lens. Narratives of Chinese technological and civilizational achievements, paired with securitized framings of external forces, risk fostering a subtle xenophobia by constructing the West and liberal values as potential threats to cultural and political security. This transformation carries profound implications for Hong Kong’s future identity, its role in international relations, and the spatial politics of belonging in a securitized city (Vickers 2024; Yan 2025).

Political geographers have long examined how education constructs “imaginative geographies” that define centers, peripheries, and legitimate forms of international engagement (Said 1978). In Hong Kong, pre-2019 curricula and public discourse reinforced a hybrid identity that balanced Chineseness with a distinctive local-global orientation. Identity surveys consistently showed strong “Hongkonger” identification alongside cultural affinity with China (Guo 2025).

Post-NSL reforms accelerate a process of scalar rescaling: a deliberate reconfiguration of power, governance, and identity across different geographical scales—local, regional, national, and global—which are socially constructed and politically contested rather than fixed or natural (Brenner 2001; Swyngedouw 2004). States and institutions actively “upscale” or “downscale” issues to shift authority and reshape spatial relations. In the Hong Kong context, this involves repositioning the city from a semi-autonomous global hub to an integral node in China’s national development strategy. Hong Kong is being repositioned from a semi-autonomous global........

© E-International