What does the decolonial turn mean to a postcolonial policy context like Cyprus and Hong Kong? In recent times, there has been a plethora of literature in the English-using scholarly community, on the need to decolonise curriculum, knowledge, and research. This sentiment is prevalent and widely shared amongst scholars, particularly in the West. Decoloniality has intersected with important research themes such as race, gender, climate justice, Indigenous studies, to name just a few common examples. In this paper, I offer a slightly different angle on the decolonial turn and what it might mean and be practised differently, based on a partial perspective from/in Hong Kong. I outline three tasks which constitute what I call difficult decoloniality: 1) the need to problematise existing research discourse about Hong Kong education policy studies published in flagship academic journals in the West; 2) the demand for a language of description to scratch beneath the surface of complex problems underlying politics and policy of education in non-Western context; and 3) a faithful and subversive extension of sociological theory that goes beyond the Western hermeneutical horizons. I draw on a couple of research articles published in Western journals and recent policy changes in relation to teacher professionalism in post-2019 Hong Kong, to illustrate these three points. While sociological knowledge produced by/in the West such as the ‘classics’ by Durkheim, Marx, and Weber has long been subjected to criticism by decolonial scholars, I focus instead on the fecundity of descriptions that theoretical enterprises and valid concerns expressed by sociologists such as Basil Bernstein, have enabled. More specifically, I turn to recent policy instruments related to teacher quality such as Professional Standards for Teachers of Hong Kong, Guidelines on Teachers’ Professional Conduct, and Guidelines for Handling School Complaints, all of which are connected to the post-2019 political crisis and complex problems such as teacher bashing, doxxing, online abuse, complaints against schoolteachers. Contrary to prevalent literature in the West on terrors of performativity and ambivalence arising from policy enactment, I argue that it is equally important to address what these policy instruments have done and enabled. In other words, two issues arise from the decolonial perspective on an Asian policy context: 1) the importance of historicity and contextuality in which theory produced in the West might speak otherwise; and 2) social and epistemic conditions under which a theory from the West is still rendered valid in the postcolonial context.

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