Kevin Yeung
Kevin Yeung Yun-hung is a Hong Kong government official. He is the current Secretary for Education since 2017.
He graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a Bachelor of Social Sciences and a Master of Business Administration degree from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia. He worked as an accountant in the private sector for seven years before joining the Hong Kong government in 1992 as an administrative officer.
He served in various bureaux and departments, including more than four years as assistant to Secretary for Home Affairs Tsang Tak-sing. In 2010 he transferred to the Food and Health Bureau, and later served in the Home Affairs Bureau, the Kowloon City District Office, and the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Sydney. He was promoted to Administrative Officer Staff Grade C in 2004. In November 2012, he was appointed Under Secretary for Education.
In July 2017, he became the Secretary for Education in Chief Executive Carrie Lam's administration.
In his two senior Education Bureau roles, Yeung has frequently been criticised for his positions on contentious education matters, including: his support for Mandarin language teaching over Cantonese, his mother tongue; calling for teachers to dissuade students from voicing support for the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests and that any school principal who supports a teacher under investigation may be disqualified; and speedy criticism of a question in the 2020 Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education Examination that asked if Japan 'did more good than harm to China' between 1900 and 1945, calling it "problematic" and "biased".
In June 2020, he wrote to school principals urging them to discipline students who took part in a union-organised referendum on whether to boycott classes as a protest against China's imposition of national security legislation through amending an annex to the Basic Law, calling it a 'meaningless ballot'. His letter also told principals to ensure that students did not shout slogans, form human chains, put up posters or even sing songs containing political messages.
