Restricted Records: How Hong Kong Communities Lose Out When Archives Stay Closed

Matthew Hurst

Access to sources determines what can and cannot be researched. Outside of academia, access also affects the public’s capacity to maintain a tangible link to the past. Collections are especially important for expatriate communities. In this post, I describe how Hong Kong’s diasporic communities are being denied access to 88,000 records created during the colonial era.

In a recent Active History contribution, June Chow wrote about a successful collaboration between academics and archivists that resulted in a positive outcome for the Chinese Canadian community. Chow submitted an Access to Information and Privacy request to Library and Archives Canada, which in turn suggested that a block request would be more appropriate. This block request led to the opening of a significant number of files relating to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act and revealed hitherto unknown stories of injustice, activism and family reunion. In Chow’s case, researchers and information professionals worked together to unlock records that have brought insights to the Chinese Canadian community. This was a success story; however, not all attempts to access information end in this way.

Britain colonised Hong Kong in the 19th century through two treaties, which lasted in perpetuity, and a lease, set to expire in 1997. With the expiry of the lease on the horizon, in 1983 and 1984, British and mainland Chinese officials negotiated the future of Hong Kong. Negotiations concluded that Britain would hand Hong Kong to China in 1997. In my PhD research, I examine how the Sino-British talks were influenced by Hong Kong people, by which I mean people who were resident in Hong Kong at the time and who associated the city’s future with their own.

My research is based at the University of York in the United Kingdom (UK). The UK has a long history with regards to Hong Kong and greater China tainted by racism, coloured by Empire and shaped by the Commonwealth. In the 19th century, Chinese communities often grew around ports such as Limehouse, Liverpool and Glasgow despite racist efforts to inhibit entry and settlement. At the turn of the 20th century, Chinese people in the UK were vilified when the xenophobic ‘yellow peril’ gripped the nation. After the Second World War, successive British governments sought to limit migration from across the Empire and former Empire. The 1981 British Nationality Act, for instance, was condemned for treating the (mostly white) people of the Falklands and Gibraltar differently to the (mostly Chinese) Hong Kong people. Lastly, once Britain agreed to give Hong Kong to China, it was criticised as “inherently racist” for refusing to offer right of abode to Hong Kong people.

Canada also has an ignoble history with regards people from Hong Kong and greater China. In the 1850s, thousands of people were tempted from China to Canda and other gold rush countries. As Elizabeth Sinn and Graham E. Johnson have noted, Hong Kong became a key hub for transit and trade during the rush. As the Qing Empire collapsed, Hong Kong and Chinese people were also pulled to Canada by the prospect of work and opportunities. But over many decades, Chinese people in Canada were harshly discriminated against. Building on decades of punitive capitation taxes, the aforementioned 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act largely prohibited Chinese migration to Canada until 1947.

Following Beijing’s imposition of a National Security Law in 2020, the Canadian and British governments both created de facto refugee routes to enable people to leave Hong Kong. History was at the forefront of officials’ minds. When Canada created two pathways by which Hong Kong citizens could ultimately gain permanent residence in Canada, the government noted its “longstanding ties with the people of Hong Kong”. Meanwhile, Britain changed its rules for British Nationals (Overseas) status holders to create the prospect of obtaining indefinite leave to remain and full British citizenship, similarly citing a need to “honour [… a] historic and moral commitment to the people of Hong Kong”. Canada and the UK are now home to some of the largest Hong Kong diasporic communities in the world.

As these communities have grown, so too has public and academic interest in Hong Kong, especially after Hong Kong was handed to Beijing in 1997 and China’s promise to grant the city a high degree of autonomy was put to the test. The University of British Columbia hosts the Hong Kong Studies Initiative – the only multidisciplinary network for Hong Kong Studies outside of Asia. The UK, meanwhile, has a greater number and variety of Hong Kong-related research centres than anywhere in the world. Canada and the UK therefore both have growing Hong Kong diasporic communities and an increasing appetite for academic research into Hong Kong.

Much research into Hong Kong’s colonial history relies upon records held at The National Archives in London. The records available were created by British Government departments in Westminster. They provide a view of Hong Kong as seen from London – a large step removed from Hong Kong itself. Hong Kong’s Public Records Office holds files from the colonial era but not all of the catalogued records are open. Some are subject to an ‘Access Application’ form and many of those that are open are of a low security grading offering only shallow insights into the workings of the colonial government.

There is another cache of Hong Kong records in the UK but it remains unavailable to researchers and the wider public. In 2011, the British Government admitted it was holding tens of thousands of files created by colonial governments and shipped to the UK on the eve of decolonisation. It subsequently committed to releasing all of these files (save for those exempted on legal grounds). Over the course of a few years, some 20,000 records originating in 40 former colonies were made available at The National Archives as series FCO 141, known as the ‘migrated archives’. Yet files from Hong Kong were not amongst those opened.

In my recent paper, I uncover that the British Government continues to hold around 88,000 files from the former colony of Hong Kong. Indications are that they are a mixture of originals and copies, came from many branches of the government secretariat, were made between the Second World War and the 1997 handover, and range in security grading from the lowest to the very highest level of ‘top secret’.

For my paper, like Chow and colleagues, I used access to information legislation as a research method, which in the UK is called the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. Over the course of two years, I submitted almost 20 FOI requests. Some requests were for specific documents; others were for answers to questions. My success was, however, somewhat less impressive than that of Chow and colleagues with only a few requests entirely fulfilled, one barely fulfilled (only scraps of information were released) and most denied or redirected to another department.

To piece together the story of the Hong Kong records in the UK, I combined my successful FOI requests with open archive material from collections scattered across London, Oxford, Hong Kong and Australia. I also drew on newspapers and autobiographies, and conducted interviews. I found that as the British withdrawal from Hong Kong approached, the colonial government established a team to copy and transport records. Officials in the UK also sought a legal basis for retaining the files, hoping to keep parts of the collection closed until 2047 when the Sino-British Joint Declaration’s protections over Hong Kong’s systems and way of life are set to expire. Meanwhile, officials negotiated also with their mainland Chinese counterparts about the colonial government’s archives and how they would be handled after 1997.

There is light in this otherwise gloomy story, however. Firstly, Chow and I both benefitted from our respective country’s access to information legislation. Although I could not obtain all 88,000 Hong Kong files through FOIs, British government departments were helpful in providing files or titbits of information. Secondly and relatedly, Chow and I were both fortunate that the materials in which we were interested were protected under legislation. Hong Kong, by contrast, has no archives law and reams of government papers have already been destroyed, as I describe in my recent paper. Lastly, there are some indications that the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office may begin working on the collection as early as 2027. It will take many years to assess the files for release but we might expect to see some of the Hong Kong records available before 2047.

As Catherine Clement notes with regards to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act, it was not only the Act that hurt Chinese Canadians but also the continued denial of access to historical records about their past. Our relationship with the past is delimited by the sources we can access. In another post, Chow reminds us of how damaging it is to a community – whether diasporic or academic – when “records remain restricted, inaccessible, and hidden” or are destroyed altogether. Particularly in colonial and postcolonial contexts, power can be wielded through what is and is not available. A community that cannot access records about their history is denied a part of that past. Hong Kong diasporic communities in Canada, the UK and elsewhere in the world – as well as those who transited through Hong Kong or made Hong Kong their temporary home – are increasingly interested in Hong Kong’s past as a way of understanding the present. Yet this desire remains inhibited by the fact that some sources remain unavailable.

Matthew Hurst is a PhD student at the University of York funded by a studentship from the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. His paper ‘Hong Kong Colonial Government Migrated Archives at Hanslope Park’ (DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2025.2561196) won the British Association for Chinese Studies 2025 ECR Prize and was published open access in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. Matthew has also published his research in The International History Review, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, East Asia and the recent edited volume A New Documentary History of Hong Kong.

Resources

Matthew Hurst, ‘Hong Kong Colonial Government Migrated Archives at Hanslope Park’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (open access) https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2025.2561196.

Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Archive Inventory – a list of the department’s records that have not been moved to The National Archives https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/fcdo-archive-inventory

FCO 141 – the files of former British colonies that are currently available at The National Archives https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C12269323