Senior Policy and Research Fellow

Jeffrey Ngo is an activist historian of, from, and outside Hong Kong. He joined HKDC when it was founded in 2019, serving first as an advisor and now as a senior policy and research fellow. He’s a Ph.D. candidate at Georgetown University. His essays have been published in Time, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Hong Kong Free Press, Dissent, and Slate. Both his current human-rights advocacy and academic research focus on the issue of immigration. Entitled “Thuyền Nhân,” his dissertation project is an international history of the boat-people refugee crisis — and the three Indochina Wars more generally — that illuminates the long trajectory of Vietnam-Hong Kong relations.

A graduate of New York University, he was a visiting scholar in 2017–18 at the University of Toronto. He was a longtime member of Demosistō, the former political group at the forefront of youth progressive resistance in Hong Kong, for which he served as a standing-committee member. When the city still enjoyed fair, open elections, he worked for two victorious Legislative Council campaigns, including Nathan Law’s in 2016. A co-founder of DC4HK (2019) and NY4HK (2014), he has also co-organized — sometimes alongside Taiwanese, Tibetan, Uyghur, and other allies — numerous grassroots rallies in Washington and New York to support Hong Kong’s ongoing fight for freedom.