The opportunity state and governing by benefits: Economic governmentality in Hong Kong's national education

Abstract National education in Hong Kong, understood here as a suite of state‐led curricular, co‐curricular and public‐pedagogy measures designed to cultivate national identity, constitutional loyalty and alignment with national development, has become a major focus of educational reform since 2020. While existing scholarship has examined its ethnic, cultural, historical and legal dimensions, its economic dimension remains underexplored. This article theorises and empirically examines economic governmentality, defined as a mode of governance in which economic opportunities, material incentives and future prosperity are mobilised to cultivate desired forms of national belonging and citizenship. Drawing on Foucauldian governmentality and Hong Kong's neoliberal‐pragmatist traditions, the study conducts a thematic analysis of 1010 government documents published between July 2020 and July 2025. Five interrelated mechanisms are identified: (1) prosperity is linked to national development and a securitised institutional order; (2) Hong Kong is positioned to perform nation‐serving economic roles; (3) state‐curated benefits encourage the formation of ‘China‐ready’ subjects by connecting belonging to employability and cross‐border mobility; (4) subsidies and incentives marketise national education across schooling, employment and entrepreneurship; and (5) rankings, indicators and business endorsements are used to legitimise security and integration policies. The article argues that economic governmentality represents a distinctive form of citizenship governance that extends existing understandings of national education and governmentality by showing how patriotic subject formation can be pursued through opportunity structures and material incentives rather than ideological appeals alone. While potentially effective in Hong Kong's pragmatic context, this strategy raises important questions concerning inequality, civic pluralism and the economisation of citizenship.