Jeffrey Ngo

Jeffrey C. H. Ngo is an activist historian of, from, and outside Hong Kong. Splitting his time between London and Washington, he’s affiliated with the Hong Kong Democracy Council as a senior policy and research fellow. His articles have appeared in such outlets as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Dissent, Slate, and the Hong Kong Free Press. He has addressed audiences widely about Hong Kong, including at the Council on Foreign Relations, the Halifax International Security Forum, the World Parliamentarians’ Convention on Tibet, and the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, among other places. He’s a proud graduate of New York University and a former visiting scholar at the University of Toronto.

Beginning with the unforgettable July 1 march in 2003 and continuing after he moved across the Pacific a decade later, he has actively protested against Chinese authoritarian expansionism, planning numerous rallies in the U.S. as a co-founder of NY4HK in 2014 and DC4HK in 2019. He, too, served on the standing committee of Demosistō, the defunct political party once at the forefront of youth progressive resistance in Hong Kong. When his hometown still enjoyed fair, open elections, he worked for two victorious Legislative Council campaigns, in 2016 and 2018. He was also one of the lead architects of “Decoding Hong Kong’s History,” a crowdfunded public-history venture between 2017 and 2020 that collected, digitized, and analyzed declassified files from archives around the globe.

He’s currently a doctoral candidate and instructor at Georgetown University. Entitled “Thuyền Nhân: Vietnamese Refugees, Human-Rights Policy, and Global Governance in Hong Kong,” his dissertation project is a new international history of the boat people — and the three Indochina Wars more generally — that illuminates the long trajectory of Vietnam-Hong Kong connections. A beneficiary of the British National (Overseas) visa scheme, after having been protected by President Joe Biden’s Deferred Enforced Departure program from 2021 to 2025, he remains a passionate, transatlantic champion of immigration reform to provide permanent humanitarian pathways for Hong Kongers and persecuted communities everywhere.