The UK has a longstanding historical relationship with Hong Kong. Despite Hong Kong no longer being a British colony since 1997, the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 commits the UK Government to monitor the treaty’s implementation closely. While the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office has published six-monthly reports on Hong Kong since July 1997 as part of this obligation, there has been consistent dialogue on Hong Kong within both the UK Parliament and regional assemblies, particularly intensifying since the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill Movement and the introduction of the National Security Law.

To delve into the changing focus and opinions of different parties and politicians on Hong Kong over time, I have developed a project on GitHub dedicated to examining the trend of mentions of Hong Kong in the UK Parliament over the years.

Dataset of parliamentary mentions of Hong Kong

The initial major output of the project is a dataset containing 16,436 records of parliamentary speeches that mention ‘Hong Kong’, gathered from TheyWorkForYou’s comprehensive archive. This dataset encompasses details ranging from each debate’s title, date, location, and content, to the specifics of the speakers, such as their names, constituencies, terms of office, and party affiliations.

I believe this dataset is a valuable resource for analysing how the UK’s and each party’s concerns and attitudes towards Hong Kong have evolved over time. Please feel free to utilise it for your research. The repository’s code can also be tailored for analyses involving keywords other than ‘Hong Kong’. More information can be found in the project’s introduction.

Visualising each party’s frequency of discussing Hong Kong

Another key output of the project is the visualisation of the annual frequency of mentions of Hong Kong by each party from 2002 to 2023, across both the UK Parliament and regional assemblies.

Before 2019, mentions of Hong Kong fluctuated between 100 and 300 annually, with the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat speakers being the main contributors to the discussions. Labour initially mentioned Hong Kong most frequently until 2010, when the Conservatives won the general election and secured the majority of seats in Parliament.

The spike in mentions in 2005 was due to the Sixth WTO Ministerial Conference held in Hong Kong. However, most speeches concentrated on the UK’s attendance at the conference; Hong Kong was merely mentioned rather than discussed. The increased frequency in the subsequent two years stemmed from debates regarding some non-Chinese ethnic minorities in Hong Kong who were rendered stateless after the handover, as they were not recognised as Chinese citizens.

The resurgence of discussions in late 2014 revolved around the 79-day Umbrella Movement, which called for ‘genuine universal suffrage’ in response to Beijing’s proposed reforms allowing the pre-screening of candidates for the Chief Executive election. The extensive occupation protests refocused MPs on the question of Hong Kong, notably the implementation of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ and the state of democracy and freedom in the city.

Since 2019, the question of Hong Kong has re-emerged in the mainstream of UK political debates. The number of mentions of Hong Kong almost tripled from approximately 200 in 2018 to 600 in 2019, doubled again to about 1200 mentions in 2020, and remained between 600 to 800 mentions from 2021 to 2023.

As demonstrated by the monthly frequency analysis above, the surge in parliamentary discussions has been driven by Beijing’s heavy-handed approach to the governance of Hong Kong, especially the proposed extradition bill in 2019 and its handling of the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement, as well as the introduction of the National Security Law in June 2020. This trend also reflects broader concerns in UK-China relations, such as trade, human rights issues, and security challenges.

Mentions per party member

Since 2010, the Conservative Party has consistently mentioned Hong Kong the most annually. However, this trend may simply reflect its dominant number of seats in Parliament; it is not clear which party has devoted the most attention to Hong Kong over the years. Thus, to ascertain the level of attention Hong Kong has received from each party, the following graph normalises each party’s frequency, showing the number of Hong Kong mentions per seat each year. Unlike the graphs above, this analysis only includes speeches and seats in both houses of the UK Parliament.

The trajectories of the Conservative and Labour parties indicate that changes in seat numbers and focus have influenced their overall mentions of Hong Kong, albeit in opposite directions. Before 2010, Labour had more seats and more mentions per party member than the Conservatives; since 2010, the Conservatives have surpassed Labour in both metrics. Moreover, while both parties have experienced surges in mentions per party member since 2018, the increase for the Conservatives has been more pronounced than for Labour. From 2018 to 2020, the Conservative’s mentions per party member rose from 0.20 to 0.91, while Labour’s increased from 0.08 to 0.37.

The Democratic Unionist Party has been particularly notable since 2014. In 2016, 2018, 2022, and 2023, its mentions of Hong Kong per party member not only led all other parties but also exceeded the second-highest by more than double (and nearly double in 2020). The Scottish National Party has also consistently paid a relatively high level of attention to Hong Kong since 2014, with its mentions per party member being similar to or slightly higher than those of Labour. Finally, the Liberal Democrats had the highest mentions per party member in 2006 and 2007, which then declined but remained comparable to or slightly lower than those of Labour.

Next steps

The frequency analyses conducted thus far have only scratched the surface of the content of the speeches, which likely contains the most valuable insights within the dataset. I am keen to discover what further insights Natural Language Processing (NLP) can reveal from this dataset. Additionally, there is potential for conducting an extremely long-term analysis to explore the historical relationship between the UK and Hong Kong, though this would necessitate overcoming some data limitations.

If you wish to learn more about the project, use the dataset, or replicate the analysis with a different keyword, please visit its GitHub repository for more details.